The prospect of literary discovery fills the public imagination with powerful anticipation. More interesting, perhaps, than the actual reading of literature for so many is the idea that there exists in some dark archive the scholarly equivalent of buried treasure. Whole novels have been written out of just this fantasy: just ask A.S. Byatt. Will such discovery finally unlock all the secrets of a particular author? Will said author turn out to be someone else entirely? Might professors of literature finally concentrate on facts and not, well, whatever it is they do?
The latest discovery comes with no less a sense of expectation. Following hard upon an AP report, The New York Times has just announced the discovery of an as yet unknown and unpublished poem by Robert Frost, “War Thoughts at Home,” found by Robert Stilling who was studying manuscripts in a collection acquired by the University of Virginia libraries. The poem is to be published this Monday by the Virginia Quarterly Review, who had, it seems, been successfully keeping this news under wraps for some time. The poem was inscribed in a copy of Frost’s second collection North of Boston.
While I couldn’t yet get the entire poem, I did find its first stanza quoted in Glynn Maxwell’s commentary on the VQR website:
On the back side of the house
Where it wears no paint to the weather
And so shows most its age,
Suddenly blue jays rage
And flash in blue feather.
Rage and flash indeed. More soon, when we can all see the entire poem.