Books, Arts & Manners: Against the Darkness

Robert Frost By Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick Edited by Edward Connery Lathem Holt, 543 pp., $25

In this one-volume edition of Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume life of Frost (R. H. Winnick completed the third volume after Thompson’s death), editor Edward Connery Lathem has performed a notable service. Few readers or students could be expected to master the three massive volumes and their hundreds of pages of notes. (Those notes, indeed, represent a kind of book-within-a-book, and tend to be more assertive about Frost’s belief in God than is the text they annotate.) In my judgment, Lathem’s edition is actually a better book. It is tighter sentence by sentence, and, as might be expected, the narrative has a much more satisfactory pace. It is not too much to say that he has turned a massive work of scholarship into a work of literary art.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Robert Frost By Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick Edited by Edward Connery Lathem Holt, 543 pp., $25

In this one-volume edition of Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume life of Frost (R. H. Winnick completed the third volume after Thompson’s death), editor Edward Connery Lathem has performed a notable service. Few readers or students could be expected to master the three massive volumes and their hundreds of pages of notes. (Those notes, indeed, represent a kind of book-within-a-book, and tend to be more assertive about Frost’s belief in God than is the text they annotate.) In my judgment, Lathem’s edition is actually a better book. It is tighter sentence by sentence, and, as might be expected, the narrative has a much more satisfactory pace. It is not too much to say that he has turned a massive work of scholarship into a work of literary art.