The Way to a Poem

In the acknowledgments to his book Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett describes his relationship with his subject. He fell in love with Frost’s poems after being given a volume of them by his father at fifteen years old—a book that his father had been given by his father at the same age. But after encountering “the giants of Modernism and their aesthetic descendants” in college, Plunkett came to dismiss Frost’s poetry as “banal.” It was not, on his account, until one day in his office at the New Republic, where he worked as an editor, that Plunkett was struck by the complexity and sophistication of Frost’s poetry. That moment of insight, a mature return to the enthusiasms of childhood, evidently sparked Plunkett’s interest in writing an intellectual biography of Frost.