2017 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The Art and Letters of Robert Frost
| Project/Area Number |
17K02568
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| Research Institution | Doshisha University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | Robert Frost / American poetry |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
During the 2017-2018 academic year, I (and my three co-editors) began work in earnest on volume three of The Letters of Robert Frost (under contract with Harvard University Press). Over the course of the spring and summer I transcribed letters dating to 1929-1936 (volume two of the edition covered the years 1920-1928, volume one the years 1886-1920). During late summer and early autumn I traveled to the United States to examine new caches of Frost letters. One is in the possession of the daughter of Howard Schmitt, a man who met Frost in the mid-1930s and remained a close family friend until Frost died in 1963. Schmitt’s daughter lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and during the first week of August I visited her. We spent some eight hours going through her father’s files, with the result that I obtained digital images of more than 100 pages of Frost’s manuscripts, including fifteen letters that have never before been examined by scholars. These will now be published in volumes three, four, and five of The Letters of Robert Frost. I returned to the United States on September 13 for a two-week stay in New England. While there I worked in the archives at Smith College and at the Jones Library. I obtained digital images of fifteen additional Frost letters; while in New England I also attended the annual Frost Symposium, organized by Lesley Lee Francis (one of Frost’s granddaughters), at which I conferred with Frost scholars, and with Peter Gilbert, Executor of the Estate of Robert Lee Frost.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
I was pleased about the fresh acquisitions of Frost letters I made in Asheville, North Carolina (see above), and in New England (see above). In addition to those acquisitions, I secured the continuing cooperation of Pat Alger (a Nashville-based collector of Frost), who made available to me (in September 2017) an important cache of never-before published letters from Frost to Cornelius Weygandt. This illustrates the value of cultivating working relationships with private collectors, who are sometimes reluctant to make manuscripts available to scholars. I will endeavour to build more such relationships as the project goes forward.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
At present I am assembling the master-typescript of what will become The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936. As of today (April 18), the typescript contains transcriptions of 419 letters, most of which have never before been published. In the coming months I will incorporate about 100 additional letters into the typescript, at which point it will essentially be complete and ready to go into production for publication in 2019. As for overseas travel: in late May 2018 I will fly to San Francisco, where I will meet with another of Frost’s granddaughters and heirs: Robin Fraser Hudnut. She has agreed to make available to me all of the Frost letters she has in her possession (letters from Frost to her, to her mother Marjorie Frost Fraser, and to her father, Willard Fraser). Her cooperation with the Frost Letters Project will be of great value. In August and in September I will make two additional trips to the United States to do work on Frost: to Asheville, North Carolina, where I will again meet with the daughter of Howard Schmitt (see above) to go over her extensive private collection of Frost manuscripts, which she hopes, eventually, to organize and donate to a university archive (yet to be determined); and to Buffalo, New York, where I will again attend the annual Frost Symposium organized by Lesley Lee Francis.
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| Causes of Carryover |
My travel expenses were less than I expected.
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