Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

as Frost, who had every reason to veil his sexual velleities for his friend’s wife when he wrote about them in public, would ...

Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid—$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. “On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in ...

Reading Frost requires a kind of modesty and curiosity. Coming to this modesty has been a big part of my own experience with him. At first, I was reading a lot of the poems and thinking, This is dumb.

The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash’ by Alexander Clapp “There is a reason why Mafia bosses tend to work in ‘waste management,’” ...

There are no revelations in Love and Need, but Plunkett excels at bringing the poems to life with contextual details (such as the ones above) and literary resonances. Robert Frost in 1962.

Morally speaking, not always, and in his excellent new biography, “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” critic Adam Plunkett wrestles with how to fit the mercurial work (no ...

Robert Frost’s poem “Hyla Brook” concludes with a resounding claim: “We love the things we love for what they are.” Frost’s greatest poems capture the details of his world as it was ...

A fond memory of the poet.

“On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in his new Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, “the poetry editor called the rest of the staff over to listen because ...