During the last twenty-odd years, Robert Frost has enjoyed a well-deserved critical renaissance, with volumes that have enlarged how we view the writer's life and achievement. These works include Robert Faggen's Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1997), Mark Richardson's The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (1997), Karen L. Kilcup's Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (1998), Jay Parini's Robert Frost: A Life (2000), and Tyler Hoffman's Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (2001), as well as collections of essays such as Mark Richardson's edited volume Robert Frost in Context (2014). Equally important, Harvard University Press has begun publishing its essential collection of Frost's work, beginning with The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2006), The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007), and volume 1 of The Letters of Robert Frost (2014), which encompasses the years between 1886 and 1920.

Valuable for their different perspectives, two new books help illuminate Frost's life and work. Structurally and stylistically accessible, both accounts will appeal to audiences ranging from advanced undergraduate students to scholars and general readers. Both volumes augment the poet's reputation and counter the profoundly negative portrait of Frost that Lawrence Thompson advanced in his three-volume biography, published after Frost's death.

The poet's granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, contributed to Frost scholarship an important earlier study, The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim (1994). A key emphasis in this prior volume was Robert and Elinor's strong commitment to fostering creativity in their children and Frost's devotion to his family. Developing this theme further and extending the portrait to other vital subjects, Francis's new book provides fresh insights, including much unpublished material. Frost readers will welcome You Come Too, which is distinguished by clear prose and an engaging voice. Ambitiously combining literary biography, critical analysis, poetry and prose by Frost and others (including the author and her mother Lesley, Frost's daughter), and personal insights, You Come Too facilitates new connections among Frost's poems and reanimates the poet's life and work.

Francis divides her narration into pre- and post-1938 periods. She makes this break because 1938 marked what may have been the most challenging single event in Frost's life: his beloved wife Elinor died on 20 March. The pre-1938 period includes discussions of such topics as “The Derry Years,” “The English Years,” “Robert Frost and Women,” and “Elinor Miriam White Frost.” Francis's exploration in “Robert Frost and Women” includes accounts of Frost's interactions with such individuals as Susan Hayes Ward, Harriet Vaughan Moodie, Amy Lowell, Kathleen Morrison, and Frost family members. The discussion of Frost's relationship with his early advocate, Susan Hayes Ward (the insightful poetry editor for the Independent, a touchstone publication in early twentieth-century America), deepens our understanding of their durable relationship, while the account of Frost's connections with Harriet Monroe (founder and editor of influential Poetry magazine) elucidates Frost's emergence as a touchstone American poet. Among other contributions she published, Monroe selected Frost's groundbreaking dramatic poem “The Witch of Coös,” which also received the Magazine Prize the following year. Francis remarks, “the ongoing business of advancing the cause of poetry and of publishing in Poetry was a serious matter between them,” underscoring Frost's important cultural and literary alliances (46).

Among the most absorbing sections are the discussions in “Robert Frost and the Child” and “Lesley Frost.” Here and elsewhere Francis includes crucial information from her mother's journals that reveals both Frost parents as deeply engaged in their children's education; she relates how this education included both books and outdoor activities such as botanizing. Robert and Elinor “understood the shaping power of the imagination as an educative force for good,” and they attended to their children's education throughout their lives (11). One distinctive result of their efforts was a private literary magazine created by the Frost children and their friends when the Frosts lived in England. Assembled and edited by Lesley Frost, the Bouquet included puzzles, riddles, advertisements, “stories, poems, essays, and illustrations by the invited contributors,” which included parents as well as their children. We learn that at least two of Frost's own poems appeared in this little magazine, indicating the poet's respect for children and his encouragement of their abilities (63).

Section II, “After 1938,” features other important subjects: “Kathleen Morrison and the Homer Noble Farm,” “Mounting Family Tragedies,” “The War Years in Washington, D.C.,” and “Robert Frost's Interest in Archaeology, Indians, and Pre-Columbian Artifacts.” In several sections Francis responds to ongoing critical debates about such topics as the poet's religious beliefs and his relationship with his family. The latter discussions effectively demolish biographer Thompson's damaging (and often fabricated) accounts of the poet's family life. Francis is blunt: “It became apparent early on that the poet I knew was shockingly different from the one portrayed by RF's ‘official biographer’” (163). Filled with “pseudopsychoanalysis,” Thompson's “grim portrait” warped Frost scholarship for years and significantly harmed the writer's reputation (163). Beginning with studies such as William Pritchard's Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) and continuing with Parini's 2000 biography, Francis's biographical details contribute to the necessary corrective impetus that has shaped recent Frost scholarship.

An especially compelling feature of You Come Too is the book's portrait of Francis's mother, who emerges as an admirable, forceful individual, independent like her father and extraordinarily adventuresome for a woman of her generation. Her accomplishments included opening several successful bookshops, running a literary library, giving educational talks on extended sea cruises, working in the airplane production industry during both World War I and World War II, serving in the Office of War Information (later merged with the United States Information Service) in Madrid after World War II, and, later in her life, creating an independent school for girls in Spain. The entries from Lesley Frost's journal and her letters home are among the highlights of Francis's study; they often reveal the poet's profound commitment to his family and to American literature. Overall, Francis's eclectic volume offers Frost scholars, students, and admirers many new insights.

Jonathan Barron's How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter provides another important angle on America's most popular poet. A scholarly study, this volume is, like Francis's, accessible and engaging. Barron argues convincingly that Frost's contributions to poetic realism have been essentially unrecognized, partly because critics have elided his vital relationships with periodicals. To construct his argument, which focusses on the years through the publication of (and initial responses to) Frost's second volume, North of Boston (1914), Barron frames his discussion by exploring the cultural and literary climate from which Frost's work emerged. Chapter 1 details the moral values that animated the nineteenth-century genteel tradition, a tradition that dominated US society via the mechanism of the 1873 Comstock Act. Barron suggests that this act “codified the genteel idea of virtue for the public sphere; with it the need to publish virtuous literature became law” (17). He shows how, confronted by the triple threats of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization, the genteels sought to shape American civilization through their publications, and literature became a central front in the battle for cultural primacy.

In his second chapter, Barron explains how the publishing industry, booming between 1885 and 1900, represented two bitter opponents: genteel periodicals that reflected the views of the progressive wing of the Republican Party and whose elite publications (such as the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly) had long dominated the national literary scene, and mass-market monthlies, dailies, and weeklies that spoke principally for the Democratic Party and represented the values of America's new urban and immigrant population. A key player who negotiated between these camps, William Dean Howells fundamentally shaped the literary and cultural milieu in which youthful Robert Frost came of age. Though Howells participated in genteel literary culture, he rejected its romantic tenor, stressing realism. Genteels found themselves beleaguered by other movements, some imported from Europe, that included – especially among poets – symbolism and decadence, both of which emphasized craft and beauty for their own sake. Despite these trends, some American poets, such as Stephen Crane in Black Riders, were moving toward verse realism. Though I necessarily simplify these aesthetic strands, Barron carefully and clearly describes their emergence and their interrelationships, showing how Frost's work shrewdly negotiated the era's conflicting literary currents.

Chapter 3 of How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter explores how Frost's upbringing and education propelled him toward realism in his early poetry. While the poet's experiences at Lawrence High School, Dartmouth, and Harvard emphasized genteel values and literature – for example, encountering Francis Turner Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Verse at Dartmouth impacted the young writer profoundly – other forces counterbalanced these elite environments. Barron argues persuasively that Frost's early years in San Francisco as the son of a prominent local Democrat, coupled with his work experiences in the Lawrence mills, deeply shaped his worldview.

Subsequent chapters focus principally on publication contexts for specific poems, beginning with “My Butterfly” and “The Birds Do Thus.” This chapter situates Frost's earliest work within the 1890s American publishing scene, including his dispute with publisher William Hayes Ward concerning Sidney Lanier's theories of musicality in poetry. Subsequent chapters describe such subjects as Frost's encounters with pragmatist philosophy and Darwinian theories at Harvard, his responses to the theories of French philosopher Henri Bergson, his relationships with the British Georgian poets, and his clashes with Ezra Pound concerning free verse.

How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter shows convincingly how Frost's relationship with the genteel tradition was complex and sometimes ambivalent. While the poet appreciated many of that tradition's values – Barron highlights its emphasis on duty, character, and virtue, qualities often elicited by hard work – he also understood that American culture regarded those values as feminine. Essentially expressing an elite, upper-middle-class and affluent perspective that sought to defend against an increasingly heterogeneous and democratic America, genteel early twentieth-century American poetry had come to express these moral values largely through emphasizing idealized, abstract images expressed in conventional meter. Barron reveals how, though Frost did not quarrel with the genteels’ core values, he indirectly critiqued the dominant class's elitism through his emphasis on everyday experience, ordinary people (especially noteworthy in North of Boston), and common language. Barron argues that Frost's unique innovation was to combine this inventive realism with a commitment to meter that evoked the genteel tradition. Barron's book contributes significantly to our understanding of the early Frost, especially the importance of periodical publication and the significance of influential early twentieth-century literary figures – including not just the Wards, Pound, and Lowell, but also Harold Monro, Edward Garnett, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Jessie Rittenhouse – to his developing reputation. How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter also reinforces our understanding of Frost's versatility, his desire and ability to reach multiple audiences. Such scope emerges plainly as Barron reminds readers that Frost published not only in genteel publications such as newspapers in Lawrence, Derry, and Boston; the Independent; and elite journals like Poetry; but also in the family magazine Youth's Companion (which accepted three poems, including “The Flower Boat” and “Reluctance”).

In a discerning 1953 essay, Randall Jarrell, himself a distinguished poet and one of Frost's most discerning critics, commented that “Frost's best poetry – and there is a great deal of it, at once wonderfully different and wonderfully alike – deserves the attention, submission, and astonished awe that real art always requires of us.”Footnote ¹ This admiration still resonates, as Frost's poetry echoes everywhere in American culture. Francis's more personal assessment of the poet's life and work complements Barron's exploration of the cultural contexts that impacted his writing; together, they significantly advance Frost studies. Fruitfully complicating our appreciation (in all senses) of his work, these books remind us why Frost remains one of America's touchstone poets, an innovator whose work rewards continuing exploration.