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A Robert Frost poem rediscovered

By Ed Pilkington

A Virginia University student stumbled upon the verse,War Thoughts at Home

New York: A student in Virgina has rediscovered a poem by Robert Frost that lay unpublished for 88 years. The poem, War Thoughts at Home, casts light on the development of Frost's first world-war poetry. It was written in 1918, after his friend, Edward Thomas, died in the trenches of France.

Robert Stilling, a post graduate student at the University of Virginia, was browsing through correspondence relating to Frost 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 It referred to an "unpublished poem about the war" which Frost had written on an inside page of a book held by Melcher.

"I went back to the desk for the book in question and, within minutes, I had in my hands a puzzle. There, inscribed by Frost, was a poem that began with a `flurry of bird war' and ended with a train of sheds laying `dead on a side track.'"

The poem will be published in the autumn edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review. The review's editor, Ted Genoways, was the last person to uncover a Frost poem seven years ago. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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