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.

华兹华斯和柯勒律治，庞德和艾略特，拜伦和雪莱：听到其中一个名字而不想到另一个名字是很难的，弗罗斯特和托马斯并不是自然而然地以同样的方式联系在一起，他们之间的友谊也相对不为人注意。然而，英国旅行作家、评论家和诗人爱德华·托马斯对罗伯特·弗罗斯特的影响，可能不亚于柯勒律治对华兹华斯或雪莱对拜伦的影响。弗罗斯特就是这样认为的。他很少承认欠债，但他告诉路易斯·默廷斯：“托马斯为我做了很多，我永远无法报答他对我的怀念。”（默廷斯，1965,135）。这本弗罗斯特的新传记强调了他与托马斯的友谊，将这种关系视为弗罗斯特艺术和个人发展的关键。它试图确定托马斯到底为弗罗斯特“做了”什么，他对弗罗斯特有多重要，以及为什么，在他们认识的四年里，以及在托马斯英年早逝后弗罗斯特生活的四十年里。这项研究将揭示弗罗斯特是如何完全被托马斯迷住的——在他漫长的一生中，他受到托马斯和他们友谊的影响；他失去的朋友一直困扰着他，支持他度过了辉煌的事业，直到晚年。通过弗罗斯特与托马斯的友谊来了解弗罗斯特，可以让我们对他生活和思想的几个方面有新的认识：这有助于我们理解弗罗斯特在1913年至1917年这一关键时期及其后作为作家的发展；它揭示了作品本身——其变化的风格和隐藏的关注点——以及弗罗斯特决心成功的动机。他们的友谊的历史和后世也使弗罗斯特难以捉摸的内心世界更加清晰。第三，研究揭示了弗罗斯特作为作家和思想家的进步品质，这是他晚年由于个人和职业原因而掩盖的一面。弗罗斯特和托马斯都不喜欢英国人的势利及其所反映的压迫性的社会等级制度。然而，他们两人都不能被认为是革命者，甚至不能被认为是彻头彻尾的左翼。他们对政治的微妙感受延续到他们对文化和道德的看法，他们对人际关系的相似理解和共同的幽默感。此外，他们对教育的看法相似，对“回归土地”有共同的兴趣。弗罗斯特希望在新英格兰的农场生活，这不仅仅是为了方便或半心半意，而是他那个时代渴望“回归土地”的一部分（效仿梭罗或托尔斯泰的例子）。他和托马斯都有保留地接受了简单生活的理想——相信社会及其个人成员可以通过在乡村生活和追求现在所谓的可持续性来更新。他们的保留意见也很相似。两人都不是明确的简单生活主义者（比如他们同时代的爱德华·卡彭特），因为他们都知道自己无法脱离城市世界。相反，弗罗斯特和托马斯都试图将文学上的成功（足够养活他们不断壮大的家庭，如果没有更多的话）与对理想的追求结合起来：一种非常规的、有时不方便的生活方式。因此，弗罗斯特与托马斯的友谊有助于培养他作为诗人的最大优势之一：他对理想主义的价值和缺点的深刻洞察。对于弗罗斯特和托马斯来说，追求理想的唯一途径就是在这个世界上桀骜不驯服的物质中，通过这些物质来寻求理想的实现。坚持自己的信念，同时允许世界不断挑战你的信念，这一原则同样适用于写作和生活，适用于政治和文学，这是他们友谊的核心。此外，它在弗罗斯特的风格中找到了完全相同的东西。

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.