The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936
edited by Mark Richardson, Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore.
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 818 pp., $39.95
On April 29, 1934, Robert Frost wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer that his “favorite poem long before I knew what it was going to mean to us was [Matthew] Arnold’s ‘Cadmus and Harmonia.’” In the original myth, Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and his wife, Harmonia, endure the deaths of their five children as retribution for Cadmus’s killing a serpent prized by the god Ares. Arnold’s version picks up late in the couple’s story, after the “grey old man and woman” have begged to be transformed into “placid and dumb” snakes, “far from here” among the grasses and mountain flowers of Illyria. There,…
