After William’s death in 1885, Isabelle moved, with 11-year-old Robert and his younger sister Jeanie, to Massachusetts.At Lawrence High School, Frost encountered Cicero, Virgil, and, perhaps ...

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry; by Adam Plunkett; Farrar, Straus & Giroux 512 pp., $37.00. Frost’s wife, Elinor, died in March 1938.

In the decades since, critics and biographers have pushed back on this dim view of Frost. William H. Pritchard, in “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has long been ...