Adam Plunkett on Robert Frost, with Heather Clark, Feb 20, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Adam Plunkett on Robert Frost, in conversation with Heather Clark
Thursday, February 20, 6:30 pm, the Skylight Room, 9th Floor
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016

By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these clichés gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson’s biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a “monster.”

In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost’s life―one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together―the poet and the poetry―and draws us back into conversation with America’s poet.

Adam Plunkett, a literary critic, has received fellowship support from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and has written for The Poetry Foundation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others. Love and Need is his first book.

Heather Clark is the author of four books on postwar poetry, most recently Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University, and lives outside New York City.