In 1947, Green wrote to Melcher, 'Knowing long time and intimate friendship with Mr. Green, the librarian of the Jones Library in Amherst Massachusetts. After just an hour or so sifting through some not-yet-catalogued binders, I found a few letters that set off little scholarly alarm bells. These books and papers once belonged to Frederic Melcher, about whom I knew next to nothing. I had been tipped off about a new collection of Frost's correspondence and rare editions. By placing the stories of these two friends side by side, we may begin to put this lost poem in context.įor me, the story begins while I was digging around the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Melcher, a rising star in the book trade, and it was Melcher who preserved this lost passage of Frost's poetic thoughts about the war.

It is the story of a new beginning for Frost in his friendship with Frederic G. The story of the other friend picks up where the first leaves off. The first was Edward Thomas-who died in the trenches during World War I-and the poem narrates Frost's ambivalence about the war that claimed Thomas's life. Published for the first time, 'War Thoughts at Home' embodies the stories of two great friends in Frost's life. In the eighty-eight years since, the poem never quite resurfaced-until now. In 1918, Robert Frost inscribed a new poem, 'War Thoughts at Home,' in a copy of North of Boston, his second book. Robert Stilling is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Virginia and co-editor with Jessica Feldman of Thinking of Reading: The University of Virginia Reader's Guide, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2007. Stilling's essay on the story behind the poem will also be published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and appears here below. Stilling and Genoways discuss the newly discovered poem with NPR's Andrea Seabrook.

'This image of him as the kindly old poet of New England is very inaccurate.' 'The way that I see it fitting in is that Frost is very much a poet of foreboding for me, and very much of mood,' Genoways says. He says that the poem fits in well, if not obviously, within Frost's body of work. Ted Genoways is editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, where the poem will be published this week. That book was part of a large collection of materials related to Frost recently acquired by the university. The poem is called 'War Thoughts at Home' and was written in the cover of a book belonging to Frederic Melcher, a well-known American publisher and friend of Frost.

For 88 years, the work remained hidden from the world, until Robert Stilling, a graduate student in English at the University of Virginia, recently discovered it. In 1918, Robert Frost inscribed a handwritten poem in the cover of a friend's book.

Hidden by helen frost summary