November 22, 2006

Robert Faggen will present “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating in the Vicious Circles of ‘The Notebooks of Robert Frost’ ” Monday, Nov. 27, 2006 from 5-6 p.m., in Dimond Library, Milne Special Collections, Level 1, as part of the Heritage New Hampshire Lecture Series. The lecture in free and open to the public, and it will be followed with discussion and refreshments.

Frost kept notebooks from the 1890s until his death in 1963. They reveal some of Frost’s most trenchant thinking about science, religion, politics, history and poetics. He kept returning to certain thoughts, including the notion of having ideas, their origins and their place in poetry. The “dark sayings” of Frost’s notebooks bring us much closer to the mind of poet.

Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. His notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into his complex and often highly contradictory thinking, and his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James.

Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and Chair of the Literature Department at Claremont McKenna College. His selected publications include:” Ken Kesey: An American Life” (forthcoming), “The Writings of Robert Frost, The Notebooks of Robert Frost” (2007), “Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin” (1997), “The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost”(2001), and “Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz” (1997).

The Center for New England Culture’s Heritage New Hampshire Lecture Series is supported by an endowment from Heritage New Hampshire. The series annually presents lectures on the images, people, and places of New England, featuring the best of contemporary scholarship on the region.