Talk:Robert Frost/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Lee

Came here to find out why a New England poet was named Robert Lee Frost, but there is no mention of the middle name in the article other than the fact of it. This article might be a good starting point: http://www.michaeljroueche.com/2013/03/a-yankee-poet-a-southern-general-a-civil-war-novel/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 21:28, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

That he was named after RE Lee isn't often mentioned in biographies, nor does the blog post say much about why Frost was named after Lee or what effect, if any, it had on his personality.

A Yankee poet named for a Confederate icon? How can that be? Simple: We don’t get to name ourselves. Robert Lee Frost was born not in New England, but in San Francisco March 26, 1874 to a father and mother who had migrated from New England. Frost’s father, supposedly fed up with the Republican policies of New England, moved his family west. There, he edited a Democratic-Party-supporting newspaper and was a proud “Copperhead, a southern sympathizer and champion of States rights.”

What does a source such as the Thompson biography have to say about Frost's middle name? Dhtwiki (talk) 18:24, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

https://www.robertfrost.org/robert-frost-facts.jsp "3. He was named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 06:36, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/robert-frost-life-and-career/

"She was a poetess and so wanted to name her son Robert after Robert Burns, the greatest poet of Scotland, but the father wanted to name him after General Lee. So, as a compromise, the boy was named Robert Lee. Hence his full name is Robert Lee Frost."

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0296560/bio

His father was a journalist who dabbled in politics, was rebellious and named his son after the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. William Frost was also an alcoholic and tubercular. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 06:41, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

This sort of thing might indeed have an effect on one's personality:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/reviews/990425.25benfyt.html

Will Frost, by contrast, was a hard-drinking, pistol-packing newspaperman who kept a jar of pickled bull's testicles on his desk (meaning, presumably, Don't mess with me). As an independent-minded young man, Will had run away from home in Massachusetts to join the Confederate Army. (He got as far as Philadelphia before the police remanded him to his furious parents.) Later, he ran away to California, where he named his son after his hero, Robert E. Lee. When Will Frost died at 34, of tuberculosis and drink, Belle returned the family to the East and the strained mercy of her husband's parents. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 07:13, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

The New York Times review of Parini's biography would be the most reliable source, all of them saying essentially the same thing with regard to Frost's middle name; but there's still no mention of how we know. What letter, what recollection of Frost's, etc., tells us why he was named. And being named after RE Lee meant what to Frost? His mother wanted him to be named for Robbie Burns, and her family were not, apparently, Southern sympathizers. After age 11, Frost spent his time with them. His life afterwards seemed to have little to do with "moonlight and magnolias" or the Lost Cause. Dhtwiki (talk) 20:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/frost-obit.html "�Raymond Holden, poet and critic, pointed out in a "profile" in The New Yorker magazine that there was more than the ordinary amount of paradox in the personality and career of Frost. Essentially a New England poet in a day when there were few poets in that region, he was born in San Francisco; fundamentally a Yankee, he was the son of an ardent Democrat whose belief in the Confederacy led him to name his son Robert Lee; a farmer in New Hampshire, he preferred to sit on a fence and watch others work; a teacher, he despised the rigors of the educational process as practiced in the institutions where he taught.

Like many another Yankee individualists, Robert Frost was a rebel. So was his father, William Frost, who had run away from Amherst, Mass., to go West. His mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, emigrated to Philadelphia when she was a girl." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 22:25, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/frost-thompson.html "Frost's disengagements from the people who helped him either at the farm, like Carl Burell, or in London, like F.S. Flint and Pound; his often secretive work on his poems and his subsequent hoarding of them so that it is still difficult to know whether certain works were written in these years or much later; his physical laziness; his frequent and still unexplained illnesses; his rages and resorts to physical violence matching that of his father (a kind of Heathcliffe who once beat him about the legs with a chain) -- there is ample evidence scattered through this volume that the story of Frost can only be penetrated by the most speculative and compassionate analysis." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 22:34, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/frost-thompson2.html Damning stuff. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.11.36.194 (talk) 22:58, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Impressive amount of material you've gathered, but it doesn't show that Frost's being named after RE Lee was anything more than a triviality. What Frost's father had in mind when he insisted on naming him meant what to his son? Your material doesn't show how Frost felt inspired by RE Lee's life or take after him in any way: for example, RE Lee was a model student; Frost was not. Dhtwiki (talk) 01:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC)