Robert Frost's Handwriting

The Impossible Art of Deciphering ManuscriptsRobert Frost is hardly the first to give editors trouble.
By Megan Marshall
Posted Friday, Feb. 8, 2008, at 7:43 AM ET
Click here for a slide show on deciphering manuscripts.

Robert Frost has been having a hard winter. First the remote Vermont farmhouse where he summered from 1939 to 1963 was vandalized by partying teenagers.* Windows were smashed, dishes broken, a chair split up for firewood, precious artwork and antiques splattered with beer and bodily fluids. Then last month, charges were raised against a scholarly edition of Frost's private notebooks. The work, first published in early 2007, had been heralded as offering a rare glimpse into the reclusive poet's creative process. But now the notebook transcriptions appear to be riddled with errors that made Frost look like "a dyslexic and deranged speller," who often "made no sense," according to poet William Logan, a professor at the University of Florida who compared sections of the published version with manuscript originals from the archives at Dartmouth College.....

http://www.slate.com/id/2183903/pagenum/all