SOURCE: “‘I always Keep Seeing a Light as I Talk to Him,’: Limning the Robert Frost/Ridgely Torrence Relationship,” in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 32-43.

In the following essay, Monteiro traces the influence of Torrence's poetry on Robert Frost.

“The time draws near for going to press and I must get as many editors as possible implicated in the book beforehand. Ain't I wiley?” So wrote Robert Frost on 15 October 1935 to Louis Untermeyer, a friend and fellow-poet, who also happened to be a reviewer, an editor, and an influential anthologist.¹ Vintage Frost, this statement emanates from his most mischievous, puckish, businesslike self. Frost's relationship to Untermeyer, however, was hardly unique. It was anticipated by his early dealings with Susan Hayes Ward of The Independent and, later, with William Stanley Braithwaite of the Boston Evening Transcript.

My subject, then, is a familiar one: the complex...