ROBERT FROST THE EARLY YEARS, 1874-1915.

This review by President John Sloan Dickeyis reprinted from the Boston Sunday Globe,October 30, 1966.

By Lawrance Thompson. NewYork: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.,1966. 641 pp. $12.50.

The world of literature now has a fine full-length portrait of the pre-legend Robert Frost. Most definitive biographies are not for the casual reader and this is probably too much of a book for the host of latter-day followers of the saintly public sage whose most familiar poems seemed to make pleasant sense to everybody. This is perhaps also for the best, because the story Law-rance Thompson tells so painstakingly is so filled with perversity and self-inflicted trouble as to be scarcely credible, or even tolerable, to anyone who assumed that to know the legend was to know the man and the poet.

The Early Years span the time and space between Frost's birth in San Francisco and public acknowledgment of his existence as a poet 40 years later in London. In a very real sense Frost's essential life, the life of a published poet, began at 40, but one can-not read this book and have some slight knowledge of what is yet to come in volume two without being mindful of the truth that the boy is father to the man.

The pre-legend years were a hard climb for both boy and man: his childhood had a bitter-sweet quality but the balance favored the bitter; his experience with adolescence was harsh; his formal education at all levels was fitful; his courtship was an agony more of anguish than of joy; and all too often, death in both fact and fantasy, illness or just plain wrongheadedness plagued his out-look, his relations with his family, and his friendships.

Most Frost authorities will not find many big surprises in this work, but neither, I think, will anyone come away from it without a more profound understanding of the man and his poetry. Thompson's steady focus as biographer is on the relationship of the life to its primary product, the poetry. If occasionally he seems to reach a little far for an interpretation, he surely has earned the right to do so by the scholarship, integrity, and downright courage he has brought to the formidable task of being Robert Frost's official biographer.

It is common knowledge that Frost enjoyed covering his tracks and rather few literary huntsmen ever had the satisfaction of having the rabbit of his life out of hiding even "where they have left not one stone on a stone." It would be a miracle of literary huntsmanship if Thompson has not "barked treed" at a few empty holes, but on the evidence he presents, including innumerable discussions with Robert Frost as well as an immense amount of independent research, this reader is prepared to bet on Thompson's nose for the scent of autobiography in the poems. For example, Thompson identifies 30 separate poems of this period which contain "oblique reference" to Elinor Miriam White Frost, his wife. Indeed, if there is a major personal revelation in this volume it probably is the extent to which Frost's troubled courtship left an aftermath of difficulty in the marriage and a lifelong uneasiness in him.

We hardly need to be reminded that the telling of this intimate side of the story, not to speak of the jealousy, the vengefulness and the "myth-making" propensity that pervaded many of Frost's other relationships required extraordinary integrity and discipline on the part of an official biographer who also was a personal friend of his subject. The result does both men proud: Frost for his choice and Thompson for producing an "authorized life" that has the sound of truth as well as Robert Frost's poetical "sound of sense."

The Early Years is the story of greatness prevailing over all else and beyond any saying, even that of definitive biography.