Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional poet, whose version of the American wilderness myth, full of mischief and foreboding, took him to packed concert halls and a presidential inauguration.

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Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.

This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2020.

Further reading on Frost in the LRB:

Leo Marx: https://lrb.me/marxfrostpod

Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/vendlerfrostpod

Peter Howarth: https://lrb.me/howarthfrostpod

Matthew Bevis: https://lrb.me/bevisfrostpod