This year's Frost Day celebration will be held at 2 pm on Sunday, July 8, 2007 and will feature a reading by Resident Poet Jody Gladding and a talk by Robert Faggen, editor of a new complete edition of The Notebooks of Robert Frost.
The reading and talk will be followed by a reception on the porch at The Frost Place, where Robert Frost and his family lived between 1915 and 1920.
Robert Frost kept notebooks from the 1890s until his death in 1963. They are filled with aphorisms, epigrams, meditations, notes for talks, titles, drafts of plays, and poems. The notebooks reveal some of Frost’s most trenchant thinking about science, religion, politics, history, and, of course, poetics. Frost kept returning to certain themes, including the nature of ideas, their origins, and their place in poetry. The “dark sayings” of Frost’s Notebooks bring us much closer to glimpsing the mind of this often guarded poet.
Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. He was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of entries in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion — his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War — as well as about his peers Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how a fascination with the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath Frost's appearance of supreme poetic control.
Robert Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and Chair of the Literature Department at Claremont McKenna College. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard University, his teaching interests include American Literature, Science and Literature, Polish Literature, Contemporary Irish Poetry, The Bible, Rhetoric and Oratory, and Milton. His selected publications include the forthcoming Ken Kesey: An American Life as well as The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2007), Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1997), The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (2001), Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (1997), the "Introduction" to 40th Anniversary Edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (2002), Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1997), Early Poems of Robert Frost (1998), and Paris Review Interviews with Ken Kesey, Czeslaw Milosz, and Russell Banks.
Programs 
About the Frost Place The MuseumContact Us
P.O. Box 74 , Ridge Road, Franconia, NH 03580
Telephone: (603) 823–5510
Site by John Lehet