Love and Need - by Adam Plunkett

Book Synopsis

Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost's life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation's bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost's death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson's biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a "monster."

In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost's life--one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships,
heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost's enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.

Moving through Frost's most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost's poetry, tracing Frost's distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together--the poet and the poetry--and draws us back into conversation with America's poet.

Review Quotes

"The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." --Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker

"[Love and Need] offers something of a recuperation of the poet by reminding us that Frost's fierceness is also a source of the considerable power of his work...Plunkett excels at bringing the poems to life with contextual details and literary resonances." --Micah Mattix, Washington Examiner

"In Adam Plunkett's new biography, Love and Need, both Frost and his work receive a fresh re-examination. Plunkett's own prose is smooth and compelling, inviting readers into a writer and a life more surprising than we suspected." --Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

"In his excellent new biography, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry, critic Adam Plunkett wrestles with how to fit [Frost's] mercurial work (no American poet shifts tones so suddenly or subtly as Frost) with [his] mercurial life...In Plunkett, Frost has found an ideal biographer, possessed of an ear for the tonal and moral uncertainties that constitute his subject's legacy." --Anthony Domestico, The Washington Post

" "Plunkett's refined prose and his astute readings of Frost's poems in Love and Need offer a candid portrait of the poet's enduring creative genius." --Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Bookpage

"A capacious exploration of Frost's complicated life and poetry...A superb biography that neatly weaves in nuanced and insightful readings of many poems." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"In Love and Need, Adam Plunkett gives us a fresh, expansive, and intimate account of Robert Frost's life and poetry. Blending literary criticism and life writing in innovative ways, Plunkett offers new perspectives on Frost as a poet, friend, husband, lover, and father, and interrogates the damaging myths perpetuated by Frost's past biographers. Erudite, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, Love and Need is a brilliant tribute to one of America's most beloved, complex, and misunderstood poets." --Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

"Adam Plunkett's book is an impressive fusion of biography and criticism, taking us through Frost's career from beginning to conclusion, always keeping closely in touch with the poems that matter most. Plunkett's own writing is notable for its poetic strength, for bold speculation along with a subtle humor worthy of its subject. Richly convincing, this is a major addition to our appreciation of Frost's achievement. " --William Pritchard, author of Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered

"This is a book I have needed for years, without knowing how much I did. Love and Need, precisely titled, tells the story of great art attained in the course of ordinary human foibles and affections, varieties of decency and rage, in a particular American life. Adam Plunkett's patient, high-grade attention to Robert Frost's life and work cleans away the encrusted stupidities of fame." --Robert Pinsky

"This is an exemplary literary biography--concise, elegantly written, and appropriately focused on the life as a means for understanding the work. I wouldn't have thought I had much to discover about Robert Frost at this point, but Adam Plunkett's book has been a revelation to me." --Christian Wiman

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