Review – The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Insight Into his Character, Poetry, and Thoughts
Emerson had his commonplace books. Newton had his wastebooks. Robert Frost had notebooks—forty-seven of them that have been preserved and now transcribed by Robert Faggan and printed by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2006 [ISBN 0-674-023110-0]. Faggan has been incredibly detailed in his transcriptions, recording the color of ink or pencil on the page, indicating unusual features (such as text written vertically across lines), and providing footnotes that cross-reference between notebooks and to Frost’s poems, prose, and known lectures.
Frost’s Ideas – the Basis of how he Wrote Poems
The notebooks span six decades, from the 1890s to the 1960s. They include drafts of poems, precursors to lecture notes, isolated statements, some political and cultural views, and miscellaneous musings. Faggan says, “The entries should be taken less as notes toward a supreme fiction than as notes about the nature of supreme fictions, and ways to resist them. They are Frost’s scraps of pallitative reason to get on with in a world of broken knowledge.”
What the notebooks don’t include, with few exceptions, are drafts of Frost’s published poems. Any drafts of these he must have destroyed. Drafts of many unpublished poems abound, complete with strike-throughs, insertions, restarts, and partial or complete discards. They show Frost’s method of composition. Individual words were tested, found wanting, and replaced. This might require deletion of phrases and lines—and sometimes entire stanzas. The replacement word would then be found lacking, and the process repeated.
Frost: “The Secret Places of My Mind”
Those who hope the notebooks reveal Frost’s inward thoughts—his unguarded moments—will be disappointed. The fact that these notebooks remain while many others must have been discarded show that Frost wanted these read. They are what Faggan calls “a combination of candor and cryptic evasion.” Frost once wrote to a friend: “I have written to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind….” Make no assumptions about Frost’s secrets from these notebooks, except that he had them.
Although Frost keeps his deepest thoughts hidden, he leaves behind a picture of the man at work. Unfortunately many of Frost’s lectures were never recorded or transcribed, and he destroyed the notes he spoke from. The notebooks contain many references to these lectures, however, and early indications of what he planned to talk about. For the researcher who must dig into everything Frost, perseverance in this book will bring rewards.
A Fertile Mind Full of Diverse Thoughts
Robert Frost’s musings in these “dime-store spiral pads and school theme books” cover a wide variety of subjects. Occasionally he commented on cultural issues: “Several ladies have come out with it in polite conversation lately that they were going through the change of life. They often [spoke] out about their bitches being in heat. Next I know they will be telling me frankly they are in heat themselves. I must be ready for it.” [page 495] How would Frost respond to our even more open culture now!
Politics. Education. Culture. Religion. Commerce. Literature. Poetry. His thoughts on all these—if indeed they are his true thoughts and not a concoction designed to throw us off his trail—are scattered with intense randomness throughout. The notebooks are not organized by theme or by date. Where entries can be dated, a single notebook often covers several decades.
Determining the progression of Frost’s philosophy of life or development as a poet through the years from these notebooks would be a difficult and complex study. The notebooks are random thoughts, not a journal.
This book would be of great value to the Frost disciple who wants to know everything about the man that is possible to know. They are not likely to be of interest to the casual reader who enjoys Robert Frost’s poetry.
Robert Frost Shows his Thought Processes
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