Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
A poem by Robert Frost that has lain unpublished and forgotten for 88 years has been rediscovered by a student in Virgina. The poem, War Thoughts at Home, casts light on the development of Frost’s First World War poetry.
It was written in 1918, shortly after his friend, Edward Thomas, died in the trenches of France.
Robert Stilling, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, was browsing through correspondence relating to Frost in the university library when he came across a 1947 letter from another of the writer’s close friends, Frederick Melcher. It referred to an “unpublished poem about the war” which Frost had written on an inside page of a book held by Melcher.
The poem, with Stilling’s account of its discovery, will be published for the first time in the autumn edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Ed Pilkington
