ROBERT FROST POETRY AND PROSE.

Edited by Edward Connery Lathem '51 and Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1972.480 pp. Paperback $2.95. Hardcover tobe published in March.

Inextricably and admirably intertwined in the history of American literature are Frost the poet, Thompson the biographer, and Lathem the editor. This anthology may prove useful for persons with insufficient background who admire the poet or cherish the image of an eccentric figure quoting his own work while quipping under his breath. College professors and high-school teachers may now be able to persuade students that Frost is more than a beginner with a boy's will, more than a dreamer by a west-running brook, more than a Green-Vermont and Granite-New-Hampshire explorer seeking North of Boston a further range. Hitherto the emphasis has been too often insistent on Frost as a lonely, remote, and bucolic poet overly fond of local color. In this book one may still delight in country pleasures and sorrows: wild grapes, home burials, birches, tramps in mudtime, buzz saws, and apple pickers, but the sight is now lifted beyond trees and tramps to a larger and more populated world.

The purpose is to show that the diversified poet is also a diversified prose writer with stories for children, poultry magazine articles, a one-act play, formal essays, introductions to books, public talks, conversations with interviewers, jottings in notebooks, and observations of a poet- statesman. Here, then, is a new criterion with prose as touchstones for poems insufficiently understood. Impressive among these fresh insights may be letters to a wide variety of human beings: aspiring poets as shown by Frost's introduction to The ArtsAnthology: Dartmouth Verse 1925; Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy: Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Robert Hillyer, and Louis Untermeyer; Professor G. Roy Elliott and Mrs. Elliott and Dartmouth Professor Sidney Cox and Mrs. Cox; Stewart Udall, Sabra Peabody, a childhood sweetheart, and a small boy and would-be poet, Allan Neilson, son of the Smith College President. Frost's playful prose sometimes bubbles over into verse and even doggerel. Valuable insights may also be found in early strivings and experiments; uncollected verse, begun, abandoned, or finished; a selection of couplets; and the last talk, "On Extravagance," before a collegiate audience in the newly- opened Hopkins Center.

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Lathem resisted temptations to annotate out of the fulness of their knowledge and to interpret Frost's meanings, often ambiguous and esoteric. Instead they permit text and context to speak for themselves and furnish indispensable working tools, a brief chronology, a selected bibliography (primarily published sources, the Lathem Concordance, biographical and critical studies), and a comprehensive index.

Frost once said, "There's a lot yet that isn't understood" and also "The artist in me cries out for design." In fashioning this anthology Mr. Latham and Mr. Thompson make understandable a lot of Frost and provide symmetry and design for artist and reader.