Robert Frost: The Life of a Friendship. A critical and biographical study of the poet Robert Frost that focusses on his friendship with Edward Thomas.

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Wordsworth and Coleridge, Pound and Eliot, Byron and Shelley: it's difficult to hear one of the names without thinking of the other Frost and Thomas, though, are not automatically linked in the same way, and the friendship between them has gone comparatively unnoticed. Yet Edward Thomas, an English travel-writer, critic and poet, probably had as great an impact on Robert Frost as Coleridge had on Wordsworth or Shelley on Byron. Frost, for one, believed so. He rarely admitted indebtedness but he told Louis Mertins '[Thomas] did much for me, and I can never repay his memory.' (Mertins, 1965, 135). This new biography of Frost highlights his friendship with Thomas, treating that relationship as a key to Frost's artistic and personal development. It seeks to identify what it was precisely that Thomas 'did' for Frost, how he was important to him, and why, both during the four years when they knew each other and thereafter, in the four decades of Frost's life following Thomas's untimely death. The study will reveal how fully Frost remained under Thomas's spell - influenced by him and by their friendship for the duration of his long life; both haunted and sustained by his lost friend through a glittering career and into old age. Approaching Frost through his friendship with Thomas offers fresh insights into several areas of his life and thought: it helps us understand Frost's development as a writer in the crucial 1913-17 period and thereafter; it sheds light on the writing itself - its changing styles and hidden concerns - and on the motives underlying Frost's determination to succeed. The history and afterlife of their friendship also makes clearer Frost's elusive internal world. Thirdly, the study reveals the progressive qualities of Frost, as a writer and thinker - a side of his character which he obscured in later life, for personal and professional reasons. Frost and Thomas were united in their dislike of English snobbishness and the oppressive social hierarchy it reflected. Neither of them, though, could be identified as a revolutionary or even as straightforwardly left-wing. The subtlety of their feelings about politics continues into their views on culture and ethics, their similar understanding of personal relations and a shared sense of humour. Moreover, they comparable views about education and had a common interest in going 'back to the land'. Rather than being merely convenient or half-hearted, Frost's wish to live on a New England farm is part of his period's desire to go 'back to the land' (following Thoreau's example or Tolstoy's). He and Thomas both accepted, with reservations, simple life ideals - the belief that society and its individual members could be renewed through living in the country and pursuing what is now called, sustainability. Their reservations were also similar. Neither was unambiguously a simple lifer (like their contemporary Edward Carpenter, for example) because both knew that they could not disconnect themselves from the urban world. Instead, both Frost and Thomas sought to combine literary success (enough to provide for their growing families, if no more) with the pursuit of an ideal: an unconventional and at times inconvenient way of life. Frost's friendship with Thomas helped develop in him, therefore, one of his greatest strengths as a poet: his insightfulness about idealism - its value and its drawbacks. For Frost as for Thomas, the only way to pursue your ideals is to seek this realisation of them in and through the recalcitrant materials of the world. To remain true to what you believe while continually allowing the world to challenge your beliefs is the principle, equally applicable to writing and living, to politics and literature, that lay at the heart of their friendship. It finds, moreover, an exact equivalent in Frost's style.