Poet In Frost example essay topic

Robert Lee Frost, b. San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, d. Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of America's leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region.

Although his verse forms are traditional -- he often said, in a dig at archrival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse -- he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus traditional and experimental, regional and universal. After his father's death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter.

In 1894 he sold "My Butterfly: An Elegy" to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Elinor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy. In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing.

His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frost's primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frost's transatlantic reputation. As part of his determined efforts on his own behalf, Frost had called on several prominent literary figures soon after his arrival in England.

One of these was Ezra POUND, who wrote the first American review of Frost's verse for Harriet Munroe's Poetry magazine. (Though he disliked Pound, Frost was later instrumental in obtaining Pound's release from long confinement in a Washington, D.C., and mental hospital.) Frost was more favorably impressed and more lastingly influenced by the so-called Georgian poets Las celles Abercrombie, Rupert BROOKE, and T.E. Hulme, whose rural subjects and style were more in keeping with his own. While living near the Georgians in Gloucester shire, Frost became especially close to a brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas, whom he urged to turn from prose to poetry. Thomas did so, dedicating his first and only volume of verse to Frost before his death in World War I. The Frosts sailed for the United States in February 1915 and landed in New York City two days after the U.S. publication of North of Boston (the first of his books to be published in America).

Sales of that book and of A Boy's Will enabled Frost to buy a farm in Franconia, N.H. ; to place new poems in literary periodicals and publish a third book, Mountain Interval (1916); and to embark on a long career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. In 1924 he received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for New Hampshire (1923). He was lauded again for Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). Over the years he received an unprecedented number and range of literary, academic, and public honors. Robert Frost has been discovering America all his life. He has also been discovering the world; and since he is a really wise poet, the one thing has been the same thing as the other.

He is more than a New England poet: he is more than an American poet; he is a poet who can be understood anywhere by readers versed in matters more ancient and universal than the customs of one country, whatever that country is. Frost's country is the country of human sense: of experience, of imagination, and of thought. His poems start at home, as all good poems do; as Homer's did, as Shakespeare's, as Goethe's, and as Baudelaire's; but they end up everywhere, as only the best poems do. This is partly because his wisdom is native to him, and could not have been suppressed by any circumstance; it is partly, too, because his education has been right. He is our least provincial poet because he is the best grounded in those ideas -- Greek, Hebrew, modern Europeans and even Oriental -- which make for well-built art at any time. He does not parade his learning, and may in fact not know that he has it: but there in his poems it is, and it is what makes them so solid, so humorous, and so satisfying.

His many poems have been different from one another and yet alike. They are the work of a man who has never stopped exploring himself -- or, if you like, America, or better yet, the world. He has been able to believe, as any good artist must, that the things he knows best because they are his own will turn out to be true for other people. He trusts his own feelings, his own doubts, his own certainties, and his own excitements.

And there is absolutely no end to these, given the skill he needs to state them and the strength never to be wearied by his subject matter. "The object in writing poetry" Frost has said, "is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other". But for this, in addition to the tricks any poet knows, "we need the help of context -- meaning -- subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters...

The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience". Frost is one of the subtlest of modern poets in that department where so much criticism rests, the department called technique; but the reason for his subtlety is seldom noticed.

It is there because it has to be, in the service of something infinitely more important: a report of the world by one who lives in it without any cause to believe that he is different from other persons except for the leisure he has given himself to walk about and think as well as possible concerning all the things he sees; and to take accurate note of the way they strike him as he looks. What they are in themselves is not to be known; or who he is, either, if all his thought is of himself; but when the two come together in a poem, testimony may result. This is what Frost means by subject matter, and what any poet had better mean if he expects to be read. Frost is more and more read, by old readers and by young, because in this crucial and natural sense he has so much to say.

He is a generous poet. His book confides many discoveries, and shares with its readers a world as wild as it is wide -- a dangerous world, hard to live in, yet the familiar world that is the only one we shall ever have, and that we can somehow love for the bad things in it as well as the good, the unintelligible as well as the intelligible. The poet in Frost has never been different from the man, or the man from the poet; he has lived in his poetry at the same time that he has lived outside of it, and neither life has interfered with the other. Indeed it has helped; which is why we know that his poems mean exactly what he means, and might say in some other language if he chose. But he has chosen this language as the most personal he could find, toward the end that what it conveys should be personal for us too. We need not agree with everything he says in order to think him wise.

It is rather that he sounds and feels wise, because he is sure of what he knows. And one who met him only in anthologies would never guess the extent of what he knows. He is powerful there, but in the Complete Poems we find a universe of many recesses, and few readers have found their way into all of these. Some of them are very narrow, it would seem, and out of the ordinary way; in the language of criticism they might even be dismissed as little "conceits"; but the narrowest of them is likely to lead further in than we suspected, toward the central room where Frost's understanding is at home. The sign that he is at home is that his language is plain; it is the human vernacular, as simple on the surface as monosyllables can make it. Strangely enough this is what makes some readers say he is hard -- he is always referring to things he does not name, at any rate in the long words they suppose proper.

He seems to be saying less than he does; it is only when we read close and listen well, and think between the sentences that we become aware of what his poems are about. What they are about is the important thing -- more important, we are tempted to think, than the words themselves, though it was the words that brought the subject on. The subject is the world: a huge and ruthless place which men will never quite understand, any more than they will understand themselves; and yet it is the same old place that men have always been trying to understand, and to this extent it is as familiar as an old boot or an old back door, lovable for what it is in spite of the fact that it does not speak up and identify itself in the idiom of abstraction. Frost is a philosopher, but his ideas are behind his poems, not in them -- buried well, for us to guess at if we please.

The Story Behind "The Road Not Taken": The inspiration for it (The Road Not Taken) came from Frost's amusement over a familiar mannerism of his closest friend in England, Edward Thomas. While living in Gloucester shire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. Disciplined by the austere biblical notion that a man, having put his hand to the plow, should not look back, Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid.

In a reminiscent mood, not very long after his return to America as a successful, newly discovered poet, Frost pretended to "carry himself" in the manner of Edward Thomas just long enough to write "The Road Not Taken". Immediately, he sent a manuscript copy of the poem to Thomas, without comment, and yet with the expectation that his friend would notice how the poem pivots ironically on the un-Frost ian phase, "I shall be telling this with a sign". As it turned out Frost's expectations were disappointed. Thomas missed the gentle jest because the irony had been handled too slyly, too subtly. A short time later, when "The Road Not Taken" was published in the Atlantic Monthly for August 1915, Frost hoped that some of his American readers would recognize the pivotal irony of the poem; but again he was disappointed. Self-defensively he began to drop hints as he read "The Road Not Taken" before public audiences.

On one occasion he told of receiving a letter from a grammar-school girl who asked a good question of him: "Why the sigh?" That letter and that question, he said had prompted an answer. End of the hint. On another occasion, after another public reading of "The Road Not Taken", he gave more pointed warnings: "You have to be careful of that one; it's a trick poem - very tricky". Never did he admit that he carried himself and his ironies too subtly in that poem, but the circumstances are worth remembering here as an illustration that Frost repeatedly liked to "carry himself" dramatically, in a poem or letter, by assuming a posture not his own, simply for purposes of mockery - some times gentle and at other times malicious.