ROBERT FROST

American Poet

1840-1963 unofficial poet laureate of the United States

Robert Frost was born in

San Francisco, California.

At 11, watched his father die of TB.

Mother resumed her career as a schoolteacher to support her

family.

The family moved to Massachusetts, with Frost’s

paternal grandfather.

After high school, attended Dartmouth briefly.

Worked middling jobs

Had his first poem,” My Butterfly" published in 1894 in a NYC literary

journal

Married in 1895

Enrolled at Harvard in 1897, dropped out after two years due to health

issues.

He and wife moved to New Hampshire farm in 1900; next 12 years were

productive period in his writing, difficult personally

5 children; 2 died young

Sold farm, he and family moved to England

Met and won the critical favor of Ezra Pound

Long walks in English countryside inspired one of his most famous poems, “The Road Not Taken”

Returned to U.S. in 1915 amid WWI

In 1916, settled in New Hampshire, embarked on long career of teaching, mostly at Amherst College

Awarded 4 Pulitzer Prizes for poetry

By 1920s, most celebrated poet in America.

First poet at a Presidential inauguration – Kennedy’s, 1961

Like the nineteenth-century Romantics, he maintained that a poem is "never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness."

According to Frost, "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content" work to a poet's advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalist's burden—the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures.

He never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were doing. (Lawrence Thompson)

Frost: “Writing free

verse is like playing tennis with

the net down.”

And yet … a quintessentially modern poet in:

• his adherence to language as it is actually spoken

•  the psychological complexity of his portraits

• the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony

What Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the "sentence sounds that underlie the words," the "vocal gesture" that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet's ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word.

The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost's poems is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect.

Frost: "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another .... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere."

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

“The insistent whisper of death at the heart of life” – the poem portrays a speaker who stops his sleigh in the midst of a snowy woods only to be called from the inviting gloom by the recollection of practical duties. Frost himself said of this poem that it is the kind he'd like to print on one page followed with "forty pages of footnotes."

ROBERT FROST

American Poet