ROBERT FROST: THE FIGURE A POET MAKES

Shaping the story of his life and his figure as a poet preoccupied Frost. Over four decades of conversation with a number of biographers, Frost essayed an informal apologia pro vita sua in which he revised the events of his life into an accord with his idealized sense of a poetic life. In recounting Frost's experiences with his biographers, I establish the unique politics of Frost biography and suggest that Frost's vacillation between intimacy and reserve had a distorting effect upon biographical interpretation. My comparative survey of biographical sources, including the unpublished notebooks of Lawrance Thompson, reveals Frost engaged in a rhetoric of retelling in which the account of an event becomes a vehicle for expressing a philosophical commitment. I focus upon Frost's versions of one central story--the move to the farm at Derry in 1900--to illustrate this strategy of autobiographical revision.;At the core of this autobiographical impulse, I conclude, is Frost's desire to shape for his audience and for posterity his figure as a poet. Frost, for reasons both personal and artistic, consciously created a public persona. I argue that Frost conceived of the poet's role in terms of Emersonian representativeness and that he created his figure of the poet as an ordinary man as a means of establishing his place in an American literary tradition.;My biographical reading of primary texts, focused upon two unpublished plays, reveals that Frost found in art further opportunity to revise experience into accord with his sense of his figure as a poet. In reading these "dramas of reparation," I show Frost returning repeatedly to crucial episodes of his life in order to resolve certain tensions that had marked his development as a poet: self-reliance and community, commercialism and artistic integrity.