Whose Words These are I Think I Know: The Legacy of Robert Frost
Schedule
Thu, 26 Mar, 2026 at 05:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
848 N Main St, Meadville, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 16335 | Meadville, PA
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This talk will examine Frost’s poetic legacy as it has been reassessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and present a more nuanced account of Frost's place in American literature.Following his death in 1963, Robert Frost’s posthumous reputation suffered along two principal lines. One, already well established by the mid-century, characterized Frost’s poetry as anachronistic—overly sentimental, nostalgic, and ultimately unequal to the complexities of modernity. As Malcolm Cowley famously remarked, Frost was “a genuine Hitchcock chair, a saltbox cottage, a grandfather’s clock…everything nice in the antique shop, but he [wa]sn’t the voice of America.” A second line of critique largely bypassed the poetry altogether, redirecting attention to Frost’s personal life. Drawing heavily on Lawrence Thompson’s influential three-volume biography, Helen Vendler cast Frost as the primary agent of familial tragedy, labeling him a “monster of egotism,” while David Bromwich concluded that “a more hateful human being cannot have lived who wrote words that moved other human beings to tears.” Confronted with these reductive alternatives—the Norman Rockwell of American poetry or a morally reprehensible figure—subsequent generations of critics have sought to rehabilitate Frost’s reputation from biographical overreach and critical misinterpretation.
Presenting the talk is Dr. Robert Bernard Hass, who has published widely on Robert Frost, is professor of English at PennWest Edinboro and the executive director of the Robert Frost Society.
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Where is it happening?
848 N Main St, Meadville, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 16335Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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