Frost in a Clear Lens

Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini (Holt, 528 pp., $35)

AS we end the 20th century a rough consensus has emerged. The preeminent poets writing in English have been Yeats, Eliot, and Frost. A bit lower many would place Stevens, Pound, and maybe Auden. I note that Americans score well; also that, taken as a whole, this has been a glorious century for poetry in English, perhaps the best since the 17 th.