Following a brief biography of Robert Frost by James Norman O'Neill and a succinct critical comment by Elizabeth Gumport of The Paris Review, this volume, containing both newly commissioned pieces and reprinted essays and book chapters, brings together an unusually wide range of approaches to Frost's poetry. Though Frost has been famous and widely celebrated in the United States for nearly a century, his reputation has shifted dramatically since his first volumes appeared just before World War I. Acclaimed as a modernist by Ezra Pound when his first two books appeared in England, where he was then living, Frost became popular as a warm, accessible poet from the 1920s through the 1950s as four of his collections received the Pulitzer Prize. He was admired as homey and straightforward when modernist writing was often obscure; as a nature poet, an authentically American writer, when many modernists were cosmopolitan expatriates; and as an optimistic New England sage when his leading contemporaries produced dark, apocalyptic visions.