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 ...

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.

The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” critic Adam Plunkett wrestles with how to fit the mercurial work (no American poet shifts tones so suddenly or subtly as Frost) with the mercurial life.

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.

“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 ...

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

Plunkett “reads Frost’s life like a responsible critic: sympathetic but not unduly so.” He focuses instead on the poetry, which he rightly characterizes as being at heart about the ambiguity ...