Beloved UPenn professor emeritus John Richetti is back with a new set of recordings made just for PennSound. This time around, Richetti is lending his stentorian tones to the works of Robert Frost, with a session encompassing forty-three titles in total, recorded at home over two days this August. Here's the introduction he wrote for this new batch of tracks:
Robert Frost (1874–1963) became the most widely known American poet during his long lifetime, although the poems most familiar to the public during his later years, especially "The Road Not Taken," presented a somewhat misleading view of him as a benign rural sage who offered simple, folksy consolations drawn from Nature. But in fact his poetry uses the closely-observed natural world to evoke situations and images that explore moral and philosophical issues with rigorous clarity. As the critic, Lionel Trilling observed Frost's poetic universe is in fact "terrifying." His often disturbing poetic insights are delivered in a straightforward, conversational style that uses traditional metrical organization as well as rhyme.
Frost was born in San Francisco and worked as a New Hampshire farmer only briefly before deciding to move to England in 1912 to pursue a career as a poet. He published there his first book, A Boy's Will (1913) and came to know the American expatriate poet, Ezra Pound, as well as many other prominent writers while in England, including William Butler Yeats, who remarked to Pound that Frost's first book "is the best poetry written in America for a long time." Upon his return to the United States, he bought a farm in New Hampshire. In 1917 he settled in Amherst, Massachusetts and for a number of years taught at Amherst College, the beginning of a life-long affiliation with the school.
All the poems in this selection are drawn from the Library of America edition of his works, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson.
