Robert Frost: The Life of a Friendship. A critical and biographical study of the poet Robert Frost that focusses on his friendship with Edward Thomas.

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Pound and Eliot, Byron and Shelley: it's difficult to hear one of the names without thinking of the other Frost and Thomas, though, are not automatically linked in the same way, and the friendship between them has gone comparatively unnoticed. Yet Edward Thomas, an English travel-writer, critic and poet, probably had as great an impact on Robert Frost as Coleridge had on Wordsworth or Shelley on Byron. Frost, for one, believed so. He rarely admitted indebtedness but he told Louis Mertins '[Thomas] did much for me, and I can never repay his memory.' (Mertins, 1965, 135).

This new biography of Frost highlights his friendship with Thomas, treating that relationship as a key to Frost's artistic and personal development. It seeks to identify what it was precisely that Thomas 'did' for Frost, how he was important to him, and why, both during the four years when they knew each other and thereafter, in the four decades of Frost's life following Thomas's untimely death. The study will reveal how fully Frost remained under Thomas's spell - influenced by him and by their friendship for the duration of his long life; both haunted and sustained by his lost friend through a glittering career and into old age.

Approaching Frost through his friendship with Thomas offers fresh insights into several areas of his life and thought: it helps us understand Frost's development as a writer in the crucial 1913-17 period and thereafter; it sheds light on the writing itself - its changing styles and hidden concerns - and on the motives underlying Frost's determination to succeed. The history and afterlife of their friendship also makes clearer Frost's elusive internal world. Thirdly, the study reveals the progressive qualities of Frost, as a writer and thinker - a side of his character which he obscured in later life, for personal and professional reasons.

Frost and Thomas were united in their dislike of English snobbishness and the oppressive social hierarchy it reflected. Neither of them, though, could be identified as a revolutionary or even as straightforwardly left-wing. The subtlety of their feelings about politics continues into their views on culture and ethics, their similar understanding of personal relations and a shared sense of humour. Moreover, they comparable views about education and had a common interest in going 'back to the land'.

Rather than being merely convenient or half-hearted, Frost's wish to live on a New England farm is part of his period's desire to go 'back to the land' (following Thoreau's example or Tolstoy's). He and Thomas both accepted, with reservations, simple life ideals - the belief that society and its individual members could be renewed through living in the country and pursuing what is now called, sustainability. Their reservations were also similar. Neither was unambiguously a simple lifer (like their contemporary Edward Carpenter, for example) because both knew that they could not disconnect themselves from the urban world. Instead, both Frost and Thomas sought to combine literary success (enough to provide for their growing families, if no more) with the pursuit of an ideal: an unconventional and at times inconvenient way of life. Frost's friendship with Thomas helped develop in him, therefore, one of his greatest strengths as a poet: his insightfulness about idealism - its value and its drawbacks.

For Frost as for Thomas, the only way to pursue your ideals is to seek this realisation of them in and through the recalcitrant materials of the world. To remain true to what you believe while continually allowing the world to challenge your beliefs is the principle, equally applicable to writing and living, to politics and literature, that lay at the heart of their friendship. It finds, moreover, an exact equivalent in Frost's style.

Impacts of this research will include:
i) through publication by a leading US publisher, this work will raise the profile of the researcher and the researcher's university within the US. The intended consequence would be to attract additional foreign students from there to our courses here, and to raise the University's income generation.
ii) Frost and Thomas lived near one another at Dymock in Gloucestershire (amidst an artistic community which also included Rupert Brooke) and a literary society continues to draw attention and develop interest in these writers, to the benefit of the region's cultural life and tourist industry. I will use my research to assist them in their promotion of Dymock as a focus of cultural tourism and of literary activity beyond the academy.
iii) my work's focus on ideals of the simple life plays directly into current concern with the environmental crisis and with the need for cultural (as well as technological) responses to the dangers posed by climate change and resource depletion. I am an active member of my local Transition Movement group (the Transition Movement being a grassroots, decentralised body aiming to prepaqre communities for a future in which oil dependency is no longer economically or ecologically viable). I will be bringing my research into late Victorian and Edwardian simple life ideas into contact with the activities of this group, discussing in local public meetings how practices and lifestyles developed a century ago can contribute to our struggle with contemporary difficulties.
iv) Beyond the local, grassroots activity of this kind, I will be pursuing media contacts in order to raise awareness of the insights simple life ideas can provide in our current pursuit of the green economy and sustainable lifestyles.
v) American readers are relatively unaware of Edward Thomas and my intention is to bring him and his work more to the attention of that public, which will I believe have knock-on benefits to English publishers of his work and to the culture industry of this country, especially during the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.
vi) More widely, English readers are currently being drawn to a reconsideration of war literature as a result of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and our military involvement there. My work contributes to that cultural discussion, and the social benefits that arise from thoughtful consideration of the costs, losses and the potential benefits of warfare.