Frost Unpublished Work / Gaelic Manuscripts Found – Poetry News Roundup February 14th

This week in our poetry news round up, we look at the poem by Robert Frost which has never been published and a collection of lost Gaelic manuscripts which has been found 50 years after it went missing.

Previously Unpublished Robert Frost Poem Found

The poem “Nothing New”, which was written by American poet Robert Frost in 1918, has recently been published in the anniversary issue of The New Yorker for the very first time.

The poem, which lives up to its title, was found inscribed inside the cover of a copy of “North of Boston”, the poet’s second published poetry collection. It was found in the home of a retired educator by a friend of the educator’s family, who was also a book dealer.

The poem is aphoristic and short and was written in a period when Frost was at the height of his writing prowess. It is similar to many poems that he wrote in that period. It is brief, but it is tight and incredibly focused. It is in many ways simillar to “Dust of Snow” which Frost wrote following a stay in England for a couple of years, and was written shortly before he wrote the poems that won him his first Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Whilst the poem is an interesting addition to the published works of Frost, experts believe that Frost himself would have felt that the poem was not on an equal footing as the best of his aphoristic poems. However, it does have a certain grace that would have worked well in one of his many collections of poetry.

Lost Gaelic Manuscripts Found After 50 Years

A collection of over 50 Gaelic historic manuscripts that disappeared in the 1960s have been found.

The 56 historic documents have now been returned to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. They include sermons, poetry, songs, and a number of previously unknown works. They were the subject of a police investigation when they went missing in the 1960s however the police were never able to find any clues as to their whereabouts. Their discovery has not shed any light on how they might have gone missing or why, and it is not understood how they came to be in this collection of paperwork.

They were discovered by a professor from the University of Glasgow when he was researching a collection of personal papers. There is also a diary in the collection that contains entries written in both Barbados and Scotland.

The manuscripts are being hailed as a significant one. It is thought that the absence of them has had a significant impact on years of students undertaking Gaelic studies.

The manuscripts were originally collected in the 18th and 19th centuries by two Reverends, and they form part of a much wider collection which for over 200 years were an important source of research material

Some of the Gaelic poetry in the collection was written by Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, a Jacobite poet. However, most of the other works that were found were penned by Gaelic bards who have previously not been studied. There are also some songs in the collection which were written by Rob Donn Mackay the Sunderland poet, these papers date back over 200 years.