SOURCE: “Frost: The Icon and the Man,” in The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999, pp. 17-8, 20-1.

In the following review of Parini's biography of Robert Frost, Donoghue discusses Frost's life, legacy, and critical assessment of his work.

1.

In the middle of June 1957 Robert Frost arrived in Dublin at the end of a goodwill tour for the State Department: he had been to London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, and Durham. His next assignment was to receive an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland; then he was free to spend four or five days being feted. He was accompanied by Lawrance Thompson, since 1939 his designated biographer. I was teaching in the English Department at University College, Dublin, so I was included in a few social occasions. On one of those I met Thompson and we hit it off pretty well. Over the following days I showed him...