ROBERT FROST: FARM-POULTRYMAN

Edited, with a foreword, by Edward Cannery Lathem '51 and Lawrance Thompson. Hanover, N. H.: Dartmouth Publications, 1963. 116 pp. $5.00.

Before he made his mark as a poet, Robert Frost tried his hand at poultry farming in Derry, N. H. Completely unknown to biographers and bibliographers up to now, eleven prose contributions by Frost were published in two New England journals, The Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry, in the years 1903-1905 of that farming period. Mr. Lathem and Mr. Thompson have scored a literary "find" in discovering these writings and making the texts available in their book about Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman.

In their excellent introduction and notes the editors tell the story, occasionally humorous, of the years Frost devoted to raising hens "bred to lay." Nothing so full or so completely documented has previously been written about this early period of the poet's life, and their account, with the accompanying poultry-journal texts, will be of real importance to students and collectors of Frost, and will, as well, make interesting reading for all those who know and love Frost as poet and man.

The prose pieces that Frost wrote for The Eastern Poultry man and Farm-Poultry (all but one was signed simply R.L.F., which helps account for their being unknown) are mostly spry tales of poultry farmers, tricks of the trade, prize layers, and the preparing of choice, and not-so-choice, birds for the poultry show. As Mr. Lathem and Mr. Thompson point out in their introduction, these Frost pieces have a special interest in the way they foreshadow some of the subject matter, Yankee idiom, speech cadences, and human "feel" of the poems to be written in later years. Frost's poultry-farming years are specifically the background for the two poems, "The Housekeeper" and "A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury."

Mr. Thompson, professor of English at Princeton, has written three other books about Frost and is now engaged in preparing a full-length biography. Mr. Lathem, associate librarian at Dartmouth and one of Robert Frost's closest friends, is co-editor of Frost's prose works now being prepared for publication.