THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER. 388 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $7.
Poet Robert Frost possessed a true genius' insatiable appetite for praise. Critic and Poetaster Louis Untermeyer had a true believer's admiration for Frost's poetry. It was not surprising, therefore, that the two hit it off from the start—or that Frost's side of their long correspondence, now published by Untermeyer less than a year after his famous friend's death, should run to a fine, fat, square volume.
Inevitably, much of it turns out to be chaff; Frost, for instance, was a tireless and occasionally tiresome punster. But from the mass of letters stretching back to 1915, a perceptive reader can piece together a startling self-portrait of the artist. Some of it will go against the grain of Frost's more sentimental adulators. People thought of him, Untermeyer explains, "as benevolent, sweet and serene. Instead he was proud, trou bled and jealous. Robert did not converse, he spoke."
"By Return Boastage." When the two friends first met in 1915, Frost was 40 and almost unknown in the U.S.; his first volume of verse had just been brought out in England, where he was "discovered" in 1913. Untermeyer, 29 and full of enterprise, was trying to escape from his father's jewelry business in Newark by establishing a beachhead as poet and critic. The early letters are full of chesty exchanged praises for each other's work—"please send by return boastage," Frost punned to Untermeyer in 1921—as well as attacks on both the free-versers and traditional poets who still did not understand that poetry once and for all must turn away from overblown rhetoric to the language of common speech.
"Hit 'em with me," Frost exhorted Untermeyer, who obligingly struck out at old poetic practice by using Frost as an example of how things should be done. "There are times," Frost was generous to admit, "when I think I am merely the figment of Louis' imagination." But these early letters are notable mainly for Frost's continual cross references to his fellow writers—all of whom he took for enemies and deadly rivals.
Ezra Pound's cantos showed "scraps of minor classics in Greek and Latin, but not a single idea of his own." Archibald MacLeish was "a college-educated and practiced publicist trying hard to think." Frost's principal êete noire was Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology made him a literary lion in the '20s. "His new book," Frost wrote waspishly, "proves my original suspicion, not that Masters is just dead but that he was never very much alive." H. L. Mencken he dismissed as "that non-fur-bearing skunk."
One versifier (and editor of an early rhyming dictionary) greeted Frost as a professional colleague and earned his ire. "Would he claim equality with me?" fumed Frost to Untermeyer, "more claimant than clement." With T. S. Eliot, Frost could not resist a further pun. "We both like to play," he wrote, "but I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist."