Autobiographical writings are supposed to be spectacular these days, a thrill a page…. But I know that kind of thing won't do for the autobiography of Robert Francis…. [Rather, The Trouble with Francis invites comparison with] Walden, Edwin Muir's An Autobiography, Nadezha Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope. Like them it uses one life, one set of experiences, as a way of investigating how an individual existence can gain coherence, shape, and meaning under social circumstances that are hostile or indifferent; and like them it succeeds through a scrupulous honesty that is especially wary of tidal waving. The books I have mentioned could be called low-key, but they all turn out to be engrossing and memorable…. (pp. 28-9)

Words like "recluse" and "hermit" do not really fit [Robert Francis], but there can be no doubt that by most standards his life has been marked by solitude, and that his literary reputation, to those who know and admire his poems, is misleadingly slight. But the life and the work, as the autobiography reveals, make a curious fit, the obscurity of the one contributing to the neglect of the other, and the excellence of the poetry, it now appears, deriving in part from the originality, economy, and harmony of the life. For Francis, who has lived with astonishing frugality on the tiny income from his writing and occasional lecturing … is a poet of retrenchment and modesty. His effects are controlled, exact, and sparse. And he celebrates—like Issa, like Robert Herrick, poets to whom he seems akin—the small in scale and the virtues of patience, tenacity, and quietness. He writes of toads, icicles, wasps, thistle seeds and tomatoes; and he can relish a single word—e.g. "hogwash"—as a bunting relishes a sunflower seed….

The structure of The Trouble With Francis is canny. Francis begins with the middle of his life, the time when his distinctive tendencies came to full realization…. The book's design, besides affording a wry comparison to the epic, gives us the mature man, making firm decisions and wise choices about himself and others, before we are introduced to the child—sensitive, timid, beset with fears and incapable of the boisterousness and competition that are the norms of boyhood. Thus, while we eventually recognize that the child who was forced to become "a gazer and a brooder" was in some sense father to the man who is Robert Francis, we are protected from indulging in too much social or psychological determinism…. Francis' modus vivendi, a withdrawal that afforded him an independence resembling Thoreau's at the same time that it cost him a measure of the prestige he might have had by mixing more vigorously in the world, is, as he sees it—and we are inclined to concur—neither heroic nor ludicrous, inevitable nor accidental…. Reigning over all is an honesty that keeps everything in check, even the modesty, and that is capable of startling: just as you have begun to admire Francis' courage, he warns you against it; just as your sympathy has begun to turn to pity, he dissolves the suffering with a wave of the hand. He is master of the show at all times, but not, you feel, so that he may conceal truth; rather as a way of unerringly revealing it. (p. 29)

Francis has lived for years in the shadow of Frost, who influenced his work, encouraged him at an early stage, dropped in for one-way conversations, and whose magnetism and presence Francis must at times have wished for himself…. Let me take a position here and say that I hope Francis can come out of that shadow. I like his work not for the way it resembles Frost's, but for the way in which it is different; and I feel the same way about the man. I can't imagine Frost writing a book about himself this good, this true, this wise. (pp. 29-30)