Rarely given credit during his lifetime for his ideas about poetic form and technique, he was nevertheless a primary force in the American poetic renaissance that took place after 1910. Unlike Pound and Eliot, he did not fight a public battle to define a private goal--modernism--as his two great contemporaries did through their articles and reviews; and unlike Stevens, he did not formalize his theories in scholarly lectures later published as essays. Frost publicized himself widely and well, but he used newspaper interviews and private conversations to shape his mask and to share his ideas. Most of all, he spoke his mind in hundreds of extraordinary letters and in several informal essays, only a few of which were published in his lifetime.
After his death, however, with the publication of Selected Letters of Robert Frost (1964),Selected Prose of Robert Frost (1966), Interviews with Robert Frost (1966), and the first volume (1966) of Lawrance Thompson's three-volume biography, readers could for the first time study the extent of Frost's contributions to the technical underpinnings of American poetry in an invigorating era. From the letters, for example, they could determine that though Frost was nearly forty years old before he found a publisher for his first book, he confidently seized the day.
