One has to marvel at the quality of mind capable of producing a book such as this. It is a blockbusting study of Robert Frost's imagination, and it must have entailed a huge amount of work and thought. If at times it feels like the endeavours that have gone into writing the book are to be matched only by those involved in the process of reading it, that is simply testament to the tremendous depth and diversity of knowledge on show and the meticulous care with which it is marshalled. The work's bulk means that the nonspecialist might now and then be tempted to skim over passages, but she would do well to resist the urge. For one of the pleasures of the book lies in its ability to catch the attention with anecdotal details (gleaned from Kosc's fresh exploration of Frost's extensive notebooks) which demonstrate the vigour with which a great poet considers the world. So, for instance, one learns in the middle of an introductory chapter, charting the experiences and intellectual traditions that shaped Frost's imagination, of his liking for beer and port over “[t]hose whiskies … rums … that [keep] no reminiscence of their original corn rye or barley” (Frost advocated restrained drinking over abstinence on the grounds that “periodical submissions of one's faculties to alcohol allow one to recognize one's human limitations,” as Kosc has it, dryly (29)). Such details have their innate curiosity, but they do more than illustrate Frost's personal tastes: Frost's preferences were grounded in the principle that, by retaining a flavour of their original ingredients, wine and beer embody what he saw as an exemplary midpoint between original material and abstracted product that served as a model for other kinds of behaviour, including “a moderate integration of details into a coherent poem” (29).

The endeavour at large is to uncover what the book's succinct conclusion calls “the deep structure of Frost's imagination” (302). For Kosc, this structure has its foundations in the figure of a self-regulating, moderate, stable public body, whose charisma underpins the style, characters, tone, and forms of Frost's poetry. Kosc pursues the shape and then the behaviour of this ideal body through a march of chapters which take up a variety of Frost's influences and preoccupations (and break new ground in doing so): Maya monumental art, the poems of Shelley and Keats, the bodies and portraits of US Presidents, his quarrel with the pacifism of the little magazine Seven Arts, the inscrutability of facial expressions, and public and privately commissioned sculpture. It is an eclectic bag, and one emerges impressed by both the omnivorousness and the resilience of Frost's mind. The book winds up with a unifying argument for Frost as a poetic “portraitist” (255) which amounts to a mini-thesis in its own right.

Twentieth-century writers liked to emphasize the role of bodily impulse in creating art. T. S. Eliot extended Sidney's advice to “look into thy heart and write” with visceral relish: “One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts,” too. Lawrence held his “great religion” to be “a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.” Auden cheerily dispensed the advice, “Never write from your head, write from your cock.”Footnote ¹ Frost's maxim that “a poem begins as a lump in the throat” assumes a more moderate tenor, but it holds in common with the others a sense that works of art emerge out of corporeal instinct rather than abstract theorizing. If that is a feeling which runs counter to Kosc's aim of showing Frost as a systematizing sort of poet with a coherent “poetics,” then it should be said that part of the power of Kosc's study is that it stimulates enquiry as much as it supplies answers. “It began, as it usually does, in experience” (13) is how the book itself begins, and its all-engulfing revelation of the shaping structure of Frost's mind is shadowed throughout by the question of how far truth to “experience” and momentary inspiration intersects in the making of a poem with abstract notions of what a good poem should be. An artist might be “the brute who can knock the corners off the marble block,” as Frost once wrote to a friend (257–58), but as he also wrote in his notebook, it is one of the pleasures of drinking port that it still “tastes of grapes” (29).