Selected Poems Of Robert Frost:  Illustrated Edition, by Robert Frost

The pictures really helped improve this book.  My thoughts about the poetry of Robert Frost are decidedly mixed to adverse, but this book is made a lot better because it has beautiful drawings in it that discuss the country life in New England that Frost appears to have been highly ambivalent about.  This book is noteworthy for what it has as well as what it does not have.  What it has is not quite a selection of poems in the way that most best-of poetry books of excellent poets (like, say, William Stafford) are selected, but rather a particular collection of early poems by Robert Frost that focus on his poetry before 1922, when he had at least forty years more of life, and when he was already a middle-aged poet.  I feel that there is a sense of dishonesty in presenting a work as selected poems when one has instead chosen the entire body of early poems by a poet, as that suggests that one does not wish to make a selection of the body of work as a whole, or that one only needs to read the works at the beginning of this poet’s career in order to read the best of what he has to offer, and if that is the case, Frost was not a very good poet at all.

This particular book of more than 250 pages is made up of several selections of poems that were published by Robert Frost between 1913 and 1922 interspersed with beautiful black and white drawings that are often far better than the poems themselves.  As a book of art inspired by poetry, this book is most excellent.  As a book of poetry, it is not particularly all that impressive given the reputation of the poet.  The poems begin with 1913’s “A Boy’s Will,” which is probably the best material here, including a great deal of rumination on death and creation.  After that comes a short collection called “North Of Boston” that includes some well-known poems like “Mending Wall” and “Death Of The Hired Man,” where the author starts exploring tedious and lengthy poetic conversations.  After this comes Mountain Interval, which begins with the famous “The Road Not Taken” and continues on with a lot of poetic conversations.  Finally, the book closes with some miscellaneous early poems that were published in 1922 that are a little better than the average collection of the poet’s works, as they are mostly shorter and some of them deeply interesting works.

I do not wish is to be thought that Frost was the worst poet that I have ever read.  No one who has read “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” or the poetry of Bell Hooks as I have can say that with a straight face.  That said, in reading this poetry I was struck by how uneven it was, at best.  There were a lot of elements about this poetry that I was not able to wholeheartedly enjoy.  For one, the author showed a great deal too much fondness for Democratic politics, heathen religion, and seeming to look down on his audience.  Perhaps I am a somewhat uncharitable reader sometimes, but it seemed to me in reading this book that the author invited a simplistic reply as well as a cynical reply but wrote in such a way that he could not be properly pinned down as to what his views here.  He wanted to appeal to a wide audience and so he tried to make it impossible for his genuine self to be recognized and tied down, the result of which is that these books strike the reader with a sense of artifice and dishonesty about them.  At least there the pictures, though.