Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations 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 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 the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control. Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.

Introduction Editorial Procedures 1. 1890s-1950: "Hunter James" 2. 1903: "The Hermits" 3. 1903-1910: "All these different psycological experiments" 4. 1909-1950: "If I had prayed every day you don't see how I could help calling myself a Utopian" 5. 1910-1955: "Submission to the law of the machine" 6. 1911: "What you expect to find for a teacher in psychology" 7. 1912: "Bring all under the influence of the great books as under a spell" 8. 1912-1915: "A Place Apart" 9. 1913-1917: "Beggars in England" 10. 1916-1918: "All my thoughts of every thing" 11. 1916-1919: "Two Poets" 12. 1918-1921: "A time when nothing, neither religion nor patriotism comes to an apex" 13. 1919: "The Copperhead" 14. 1920-1930: "The furthest two things can be away from each other" 15. 1923-1924: "Learn lives of poet" 16. 1924: "I don't see what you have to complain of" 17. 1926-1930: "You and I" 18. 1926-1928: "Difference between meter and rhythm" 19. 1928: "I learned to laugh when I was young" 20. 1929: "These are not monologues but my part in a conversation" 21. 1930-1940: "Thick skinned: Thick headed" 22. 1930-1940: "True humility is a kind of carelessness" 23. 1935-1951: "True humility lies in suffering" 24. 1935: "Curiously Enough--as a connection" 25. 1935: "America and The Plot" 26. 1935: "Since surely good is evil's better half" 27. 1936: "The question for the original" 28. 1936-1939: "Having Learned to Read" 29. 1937-1942: "Democracy" 30. 1937: "Alcie That Socratic boy" 31. 1937-1955: "Three of those evils parsed in half an hour" 32. 1940-1950: "Leila.: What have you brought him into the house for?" 33. 1940: "Prophetic" 34. 1950: "What is your attitude toward having robbed the Indians of the American Continent? 35. 1951-1952: "Pertinax" 36. 1950-1955: "He and it would satisfy something in him" 37. 1950-1955: "If his own intuitions were correct" 38. 1950-1951: "There is a sense shadow always on success" 39. 1950-1962 "If we are too much given to reflect" 40. 1950-1962: "I wont be talked to by a woman, tell her" 41. 1960-1962: "Dedication to___ of 'The Gift Outright'" 42. Undated: "The more trouble that can be shown to have with a poem" 43. Undated: "First Answerability Divine Right" 44. Undated: "Last Refinement of Subject Matter Voice Imagination Voice as Subject Matter" 45. Undated: "Sentences may have the greatest monotony to the eye" 46. Undated: "Many speak as if it was a reproach to the Puritans" 47. Undated Loose Notebook Pages: "All thoughts all passions all delights" 48. Undated: "Nothing more composing as composition" 49. Undated: "One Favored Acorn" Notes Acknowledgments Index