Homage to Robert Frost
Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Nobel laureates all, have written perceptive, affectionate, admiring essays on Robert Frost. Eschewing both of the prevailing caricatures of Frost (the irascible but beloved cracker-barrel philosopher and the shallow megalomaniac), these writers pay careful attention to the poems themselves. They open doors into the world of words that Frost constructed, and help readers understand the music and the ideas in those worlds. Derek Walcott's dark reading of Frost's much-quoted classic, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is alone worth the price ofHomage to Robert Frost.