Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas To One Another
Ed. by Matthew Spencer
Handsel Books, $24.00

This book is beautifully produced and very well-edited, with an excellent foreword by Michael Hofmann and an afterword by Christopher Ricks. At its heart, though, it's weirdly dull. Elected Friends is made up of letters exchanged between Frost and Thomas after a year of close friendship in England. Both men were in their mid- to late-thirties when they met, and neither had any sort of palpable accomplishment behind him. The letters give some sense of how galvanizing and sustaining the relationship must have been, as Thomas recognized and articulated in a series of reviews (included here) what was so quietly distinctive about Frost's verse, and Frost led Thomas to write his first poems. The problem with the book is twofold. Thomas was a very busy man, and many of his letters tend to be quick and newsy. Frost's letters are good, but only a fraction of his correspondence to Thomas has survived, so the "exchange" must be mostly imagined on the part of the reader. Still, even this skeletal connection is poignant, and Thomas's late letters from the front lines in France are both beautiful and harrowing. "You are among the unchanged things that I can not or dare not think of except in flashes," he wrote to Frost on April 2, 1917. A week later he was dead.

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