A Time to Talk - Robert Frost

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls

to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don't stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven't hoed,

And shout from where I am, What is it?

No, not as there is a time to talk.

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod: I go up to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.

Robert Frost

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INTRODUCTION by Fobert Faggen / Early Poems of Robert Frost ★

In 1961, Robert Frost, overcoming old age and bad weather, recited his poem “The Gift Outright” to millions, becoming the first American poet to read at a presidential inauguration. A year later, President Kennedy asked Frost to act as a special ambassador to the Soviet Union and to deliver a message of “peaceful rivalry” to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a considerable responsibility given the tensions of the time. Rarely in modern history had there been such a connection between poetry and power, a connection of a kind that rightly produces skepticism in critics and readers. Robert Frost had become the closest thing in the history of American letters to a national monument, a symbol of the Yankee virtues of independence, stoic belief, hard work, and common wisdom —in short, a sage. A color photograph of a white-maned and smiling Frost graced the March 1962 cover of Life magazine with the caption “America’s Ageless Poet.” His unprecedented and still unmatched four Pulitzer prizes, as well as forty-four honorary degrees, already had confirmed his place as the king of American poets. Frost enjoyed his fame but held a deeply ambivalent attitude toward his audience and its expectations. Cultivating the image of a folk philosopher, Frost skillfully avoided calling attention to the troubling complexity of his art. He wanted to be understood, but not easily, and he enjoyed playing the trickster to his audience. In a eulogy for Frost delivered in Amherst in October of 1963, President Kennedy called the poet “one of the granite figures of our time in America. . . . In honoring Robert Frost we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength.” But Kennedy, speaking less than a month before his assassination, added, “If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because many preferred to ignore his darker truths.”

Those darker truths include the uncertain relations between man and nature, the unending conflicts among men, the tensions that threaten marriage and home, and the limitations of human knowledge. Frost’s poetry reveals fear, competition, and violence lurking beneath the eglitarian ideals of democracy and a will to power hidden beneath jokes and light words. Approachability and clarity mask the complexity and strangeness of his poetry. “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling/To get adapted to my kind of fooling,” Frost wrote near the end of his life. A great deal of “in and outdoor schooling” informs his poetry from the beginning, and Frost’s life is filled with the contradictions and tensions of both. As a poultry farmer, Frost wrote pastoral and georgic poetry, modes of contemplation and labor, in the tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, whom he read in the original. He memorized hundreds of the best English poems and wore copies of Shakespeare, Arnold, and Browning to tatters. As commanding a reader of Scripture as most theologians, he was also a passionate and learned botanist and amateur astronomer who maintained a lifelong dialogue with science and scientists. A provincial New Englander, he spent three years studying at Harvard and three years in England, where he immediately impressed the leading practitioners of modernism, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. The man who was to become America’s most widely read poet published his first book, A Boy’s Will, in England at the age of nearly forty, his boyhood far behind him. His second book, North of Boston, which has been called “the most American of all modern books of poetry,” was written mainly while he lived in England and also published there.

The great poet of New England Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, and named after the leader of the Confederate Army, General Robert E. Lee. His father, William Prescott Frost, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, was an ambitious politico in the Democratic party and an aspiring journalist. Unsuccessful at both, he died of consumption when Robert was eleven, leaving the family broke. Isabelle Moodie, Frost’s mother, was a deeply religious woman who baptized her son in the Swedenborgian church. After her husband’s death she moved Robert and his sister, Jeannie, to New Hampshire, where she became a schoolteacher. A first-rate student in high school, Robert was graduated at the top of his class, and was covaledictorian with his future wife, Elinor Miriam White. He also had begun writing poetry, publishing his first effort, “La Noche Triste,” in the school newspaper. Despite his intellect and appetite for knowledge, Frost had little patience for college as he followed his developing talent for poetry and his passion for his fiancée. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and dropped out after less than a term, working then at odd jobs. After a tempestuous courtship, he finally married Elinor.

Indoor schooling remained important enough for Frost to try college again, though his motive appears to have been bolstering his credentials to teach secondary school. He entered Harvard College in 1898, where he studied historical geology with Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (something of the Stephen Jay Gould of his time), classics, and philosophy under George Santayana, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, and Hugo Münsterberg. Under Münsterberg, Frost read William James’s Psychology: A Briefer Course, a work he would later teach to high school students. James’s attempts to reconcile human consciousness and belief with science informed Frost’s philosophical pragmatism, and the debates among those philosophers remained an important part of Frost’s intellectual and imaginative development.

A superb student, Frost nevertheless left Harvard in 1900 somewhat impatient and under pressure from his own and his family’s health problems (his doctor had warned him against being too sedentary). With the help of his maternal grandfather, Frost bought a poultry farm in 1900, the same year that he lost his mother to cancer and his four-year-old son, Elliott, to cholera. Despite depression and the demands of “hugger mugger” farming, Frost was writing poetry at night. He had a chapbook of a few early poems, entitled Twilight, privately published in 1894 and a few of his poems were published in magazines, most notably “My Butterfly: An Elegy” in Susan Hays Ward’s The Independent (1894) and “The Tuft of Flowers” in the Derry Enterprise (1906). Though he continued to write while tending the farm, success in publication eluded Frost for nearly all of the first two decades as a poet.

Aided by his old high school friend Carl Burrell, Frost had also continued to develop his passion for botany. Throughout the nineteenth century botany was considered an important form of instruction in natural theology and God’s designing providence, directed particularly at the moral education of young men and women. Frost loved the study of rare wild flowers, and orchids appear frequently in his poems. By the turn of the century botany had become increasingly influenced by science that revealed that the beauty of flowers had little to do with human sentiments or perfection but are temporary contrivances in a complex and changing game of procreation and survival. The maiming of an orchid lover is the subject of the “ The Self-Seeker,” a poem based on an incident in which Carl Burrell’s legs were crushed in a box factory. But  the dark saying of the poem, “pressed into service means pressed out of shape,” reveals the way different forms of life, flowers and men, are part of a relentless machinery in which individual interests and desires are subsumed in a larger, if incomprehensible, process. Flowers in Frost become not only figures of beauty and of poetry but also of the elusive and troubling workings of both nature and God.

While managing several hundred hens, Frost also published a number of essays and stories in Farm-Poultryman magazine, some based on the efforts of his neighbor, John Hall, to breed prize hens. But Hall’s appearance later in the poem “The Housekeeper” depicts a man obsessed with perfection and quite willing to let his farm go to hell. Frost was himself, by all accounts, an inept farmer; things went to ruin while he pursued his poetry. Frost exchanged his vocation as a “henman” with a career as a teacher at the Plymouth Normal School and the Pinkerton Academy in New Hampshire from 1906 until 1912. Both he and Elinor then made the romantic decision to sell their farm and “travel about the world a little.” They moved their four children—daughters Leslie, Irma, Marjorie, and son, Carol—to England, where they remained until 1915.

In England, Frost befriended the essayist Edward Thomas, and their conversations led to the birth of Thomas’s poetic career and the sure growth of Frost’s own. Their long walks and conversations coincided with the development in Frost’s poetry of a complex blend of dramatic narrative and dialogue. A mortar shell ended Thomas’s life in World War I, and one of Frost’s only elegies, “To E. T.,” was written in his memory. Having met little success in getting individual poems published in the United States, Frost was able to assemble an entire collection and sought out an English publisher. In 1913, David Nutt brought out A Boy’s Will,  followed a year later by North of Boston. Both received numerous positive reviews, including one by the impresario and practitioner of literary high modernism, Ezra Pound. Frost met and sparred with major players in the British literary scene, including Pound, William Butler Yeats, Ford Maddox Ford, and T. E. Hulme, all of whom, with a certain measure of condescension, found his poetry superb. Pound, an expatriate native of Idaho, was giddy over having “just discovered another Amur‘kn. VURRY Amu’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace.” Pound advised Harriet Monroe, editor of the prestigious journal Poetry,to print his review of Frost’s first book “at once as we ought to be first and some of the reviewers here are sure to make fuss enough to get quoted in N.Y.” Patronizing and opportunistic though he may have been, Pound knew, as he had when he first encountered the work of T. S. Eliot, a good thing when he saw it. By the time of his return to the United States in 1915, Frost had become a poet of considerable note, and Henry Holt was eager to publish his books. After the publication of Mountain Interval in 1916, he was offered a onesemester teaching position at Amherst, which he eventually quit in 1920 after disagreements with the president, Alexander Meiklejohn. From then on Frost would spend his time in and out of visiting professorships at prestigious universities. His reputation grew to national and global proportions, fueled both by the power of his work and also by his success as a performer and raconteur. The twenty years of relative isolation and anonymity that had produced some of the most engaging and innovative poetry of the twentieth century were over.

Frost was an unassuming innovator, though a great one. More than any poet except Shakespeare, he brought the possibilities of English meters and the rhythms of ordinary speech together with exquisite skill, power, and subtlety. Rarely calling attention to his own technical brilliance Frost chose to lure the reader into his labyrinth, allowing his poetry’s strangeness and complexity to work gradually upon the imagination. If the self-exiled Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were showing their contempt for America and democracy by crafting a poetry incomprehensible to the common reader, Frost desired to contain his vision in art that did not call attention to its artfulness. He appealed to a democratic audience in part because of a strong belief that all humanity shared thoughts and desires in common, even if only a few had the skill or the courage to reveal them in literature. He once said of his own work, “I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual observer altogether obvious.” One of his great predecessors, Emily Dickinson, wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Frost found his own way of telling the truth slant, obliquely, embracing all of its complexity. Frost emphasized the importance of metaphor in all ranges of thought, and he loved the way metaphor could both “say one thing in terms of another” but also “say one thing and mean another.” Metaphor and poetry become ways of both concealing and revealing, the way the wall does in his famous poem “Mending Wall.” Frost expressed this tension in a letter to a friend: “I have written to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you.” Yet Frost’s writing, approachable and beguiling, presents an invitation to the secret places of his mind. Frost did develop a relationship, though a diabolical one, with his audience: “My poems . . . are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them and in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.”

Unlike the urban visions of Eliot, Crane, and Stevens, Frost’s poetry strikes the reader first and foremost as being about country life and about nature, and he focused on aspects of both “common in life but uncommon in poetry.” His work appears to evoke the pastoral ideals of rural independence that had been advocated by Thomas Jefferson. And it invites us to read nature as a purifying scripture and symbol of the spirit, as it had been by the American sages Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom Frost read and admired. But, once taken in, we find Frost’s country world pervaded by struggle, limitation, ambiguity, and evil. And Frost’s vision is always complicated by the drama of the observer in interpreting any fact or situation.

Frost appears to urge, as he titled one poem, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” The title tells us a great deal about the trickiness and subtlety of Frost’s work. Sounding like an invitation to homespun country wisdom, the title wryly alludes to Prince Hamlet’s response to Ophelia: “Do you think I meant country matters?” In the Elizabethan world, “country matters” implied “something indecent.” To an audience accustomed to poetry that pointed to nature as a source of solace or transcendent revelation, Frost no doubt meant something indecent by a poem that describes the inexplicable destruction of a farm by fire, its use by birds who “rejoice in the nest they kept” indifferent to human loss, and its rebuke of human sentimentality “dwelling too much on what has been.” “Versed,” a colloquialism that means “taught” or “schooled,” casually raises a question that haunts Frost’s work: What is the relation of poetry, “verse,” to knowledge of the world? If poetry had become the repository for sentiments and emotion, Frost’s poem suggests the need to unlearn our emotions in order to accept and survive in life’s cruelty. Our having “to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept,” [emphasis mine] reflects the difficulty of accommodating human beliefs and desires to the indifference and coldness of the world.

Frost’s thoughtful and subversive attitude about country matters can be seen very clearly in a little-known interview. Asked whether he thought nature was cruel or not, Frost’s anecdotal answer reveals much about his ironic stance toward an educated and genteel audience. He takes exception with the view held by Matthew Arnold that nature is cruel and that man is somehow morally superior. But he takes special care to poke fun at an American minister and professor expounding to students on the peacefulness and beauty of nature:

I know it [nature] isn’t kind. As Matthew Arnold said: “Nature is cruel. It’s man that’s sick of blood.” And it doesn’t seem very sick of it. Nature is always more or less cruel. Shall I tell you what happened on the porch of a professor—minister he was, too? The war was going on, a beautiful moonlit night. He was there with some boys, talking about the horrors of war—how cruel men were to each other and how kind nature was, what a beautiful country this was spread beneath us, you know—moonlight on it. And just as he talked that way, spreading his arm over it, a bird began to shriek down in the woods—something had got into its nest. Nature was being cruel. The woods are killing each other anyway. That’s where the expression‎ came from “a place in the sun.” A tree wanting a place in the sun it can’t get. The other trees won’t give it to it.

Nature includes human nature, and both are always “more or less cruel.” The difference between the human and nonhuman world often blurs in Frost’s work in ways that are both comforting and disturbing. In Frost, human consciousness does not alone embrace emotions and moral sensibility, and he explores the relation of our consciousness to that of other species brilliantly in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” and also in “Range-Finding” and “The Oven Bird.”

One can see the complexity of his treatment of the relations of man and nonhuman nature in the memorable little poem “Dust of Snow,” originally titled “A Favour.” The sudden disturbance of snow by a crow somehow changes the speaker’s mood, “saving” something from a troubled past. As is the case in almost all Frost’s poetry, the details and the tone demand further attention:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

The poem represents a great technical achievement, turning the subject and predicate of a single sentence of mostly monosyllables into a supple rhythmic revelation. It has roundness, closure, and denouement. But Frost had little patience for the kind of pleasure of pure form as an end in itself—what he called “that Beauty is Truth claptrap .” Frost wrote to a friend, “My object is true form—is was and always will be—form true to any chance bit of true life.” In “Dust of Snow,” “true life” remains elusive, if still demanding both the speaker’s and the reader’s interpretation. Here the movement of a black crow disturbs the still blankness of snow. In two other important poems, “The Tuft of Flowers” and “The Wood-Pile,” the sudden flight of a butterfly and a small bird, respectively, signify to observers the portent of a message. In those poems, as in “Dust of Snow,” there is a question of how personally one should take such an event. A crow may have “shook down” the “dust of snow” on the speaker, but was the “way” it happened the result of the crow being scared by the speaker’s presence or part of a process of loosening hemlock seeds to be eaten? The shift in tenses suggests that the change of mood was not immediate. What does venturing into nature teach us? Crow, hemlock (associated with poison), and the analogy of snow and “dust” seem particularly ominous. How could this event save “some part” of a day he had “rued”? Does it recall something bad or preserve a good part of an otherwise intolerable memory?

Frost always enjoyed working within traditions, creating meaning through subtle dialogue with his predecessors. Once asked how he became a poet, Frost replied, “I followed the procession down the ages.” Thomas Hardy’s poem “In a Wood,” for example, provides a similar drama, in which the speaker learns something from nature that makes life more tolerable. And it comes as a surprise that neither nature’s beauty nor its serenity, but its quiet violence, provides some revelation. Hardy knew what Frost knew about the way trees fight:

But, having entered in,
Great growth and small
Show them to men akin—
Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,
Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters choke
Elms stout and tall.

The wanderer’s perception of nature’s cruelty leads to the revelation that at least the human world might provide more, or at least some solace after all. Something could be saved by returning to humanity if one recognizes the terror in the rest of nature:

Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind,
Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found
Life-loyalties.

Frost’s conclusion in “Dust of Snow” may be more ambiguous than Hardy’s, perhaps accepting of what are only “now and then” “Life-loyalties.” Hemlock trees kill anything that grow in their shade. Crows eat the seeds that burst from the hemlock’s buds in winter. Birth, death, competition, and struggle found in nature mute the excesses of regret over the pain we find in human life.

The title of Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, and its keynote poem, “Into My Own,” evoke an American faith in the heroic qualities of the youthful individual, escaping the bonds and mediocrity of traditional society and heading out into the territory ahead; he follows the liberating mission of the Puritans and their “errand into the wilderness.” From the beginning, Frost’s handling of this American mythology is fraught with ironies that suggest not “rugged” but what he called “ragged individualism.” In “Into My Own,” the speaker cannot do anything, only “wish” it. “Will” manifests its destiny only in the form of the hypothetical “should” and “would”:

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheels pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

Though he doesn’t see why he “should e’er turn back,” the thoughts of those “who should miss me here/And long to know if still I held them dear” remind him and the reader of the persistence of what he wishes to escape, of the real hold that others have upon the self. The desire for individual freedom in Frost always meets the challenges of our need to be social, to be loved, and sets limits on going too far in thought and in art. As he wrote in appreciation of the poetry of Amy Lowell: “The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains. The breathless swing is between subject matter and form.” And the adventure would produce nothing but the testing of convictions which he had from the beginning—or so he hopes: “They would not find me changed from him they knew—/Only more sure of all I thought was true.” This vision of a heroic individual wandering in the wilderness is tested in a number of poems in A Boy’s Will and in his subsequent books: “A Dream Pang,” “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” “The Trial by Existence,” “Reluctance,” and later “The Wood-Pile,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and, of course, “The Road Not Taken.”

If the myth of the independent pilgrim was part of the myth of America, it was also part of a Christian idea of spiritual progress and redemption. Frost, however, saw this Christian pilgrimage in terms of torture, suffering, and uncertainty, a trial testing faith to its limits. Such is the way “The Trial by Existence” concludes, a poem in which life takes on meaning only through “earthly woe” and “agony of strife” without even the heroic pride of wisdom and choice:

But always God speaks at the end:
“One thought in agony of strife
The bravest would have by for friend,
The memory that he chose the life;
But the pure fate to which you go
Admits no memory of choice,
Or the woe were not earthly woe
To which you give the asserating voice.”

Meaningful spiritual experience for Frost recognizes the limits of reason and the need to find “The mystic link to bind and hold/Spirit to matter till death come.” What comes after death cannot be known, otherwise spiritual struggle would be hollow. The poem concludes with a terrifying recognition of the way life’s trials destroy pride but still underscores our mysterious responsibility for what “we somehow chose”:

’Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.

The meaning of that “one close” hardly guarantees redemption; in earth or in heaven, we “find that the utmost reward/Of daring should be still to dare.” The self-assured march of “The Trial by Existence” into uncertainty and the bewilderment of being “mystified” foreshadows the tensions and ironies of Frost’s most famous pilgrimage poem, “The Road Not Taken.” The drama of choosing direction at a crossroads is a commonplace, but Frost’s poem evokes the agonies of similar scenes in the Bible, Sophocles, Dante, Dickinson (poem 615, with “that odd Fork in Being’s Road”), as well as Thoreau’s faith in the magnetism of nature in his essay “Walking.” How much choice is there when we learn that both roads had been worn about the same, not to mention that they already exist as paths and that they are covered with leaves? The speaker will not know until “ages and ages hence” what “difference,” if any, has been made—only retrospect gives the sense of destiny or of design. And the speaker will be telling it with “a sigh,” perhaps as much from pain as from relief, as much for regret about the road not taken as for the road he took.

Often enough in Frost human will is set against the challenges of a larger chaos. The conflict of will and environment—or will against will—is suggested in the muted allusion of the title A Boy’s Will to Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth.” Frost echoes the line “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and in so doing reveals his desire to work within a popular “fireside” tradition while also subverting it. How much force does the individual will have against the chaotic forces of the “wind’s will”? Frost once wrote that all his poems “are figures of the great predicament, the will braving alien entanglements.” In “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” we learn that in addition to a house that burned down, the “barn opposed across the way” would have “joined the house in flame/Had it been the will of the wind.” Capricious and destructive, the wind becomes a figure of chance and change that also suggests the incomprehensible and manifestly inhuman presence Job heard and saw from the whirlwind. Wind figures powerfully in many of the poems of A Boy’s Will, including “Storm Fear,” “To the Thawing Wind,” “A Line-Storm Song,” “Reluctance,” and “Pan with Us,” in which Pan, the ancient god of nature and of poetry, recognizes sadly that the poet’s pipes have little more power to stir than “the merest aimless breath of air.” Yet, in “To the Thawing Wind,” the speaker enlists the wind’s power to threaten his comfort and drive him into nature: “Melt the glass and leave the sticks/Like a hermit’s crucifix;/Burst into my narrow stall; /Swing the picture on the wall;/Run the rattling pages o’er; /Scatter poems on the floor;/Turn the poet out of door.” The stunning poems with which the volume concludes—“Now Close the Windows,” “A Line-Storm Song,” “October,” “My Butterfly,” and “Reluctance”—all take the will of the wind as a blind demiurge of life, death, and loss in the figures of scattered flowers and dead leaves. In “A Line-Storm Song,” the wind and storm suggest the threat and fear of primordial extinction against which love must work:

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

The power of love here is invoked against the extinguishing threat of deluge; love returns to overcome the ancient threat. A Boy’s Will concludes with “Reluctance,” the heart and the will resisting “the end/Of a love or a season,” as the speaker is worn down at the end of his journey. The speaker, like the leaves, has suffered a fall, and the breaking of will. Reluctant to give up, he meditates on the tension between the heart’s desire and the limits of the physical body, captured in the grim pun of choice, “whither”:

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question “Whither?”

A Boy’s Will begins and ends with poems about journeys. But the journey remains circular, following not a linear path but a cycling of seasons that begins and ends with autumn, that mythically provocative season of the fall.

In Genesis God breathed on the dust and made man a living soul. Frost often meditates on an old controversy of whether that “soul” and God’s “breath” are merely wind destined to die with the body. In Latin, the word for spirit, spiritus, is also the word for breath, wind, and inspiration. “The Aim Was Song” wavers between an affirmation and a parody of the romantic notion that man and art are the evolutionary fulfillment of nature’s inspiration. Perhaps we are only presences creating momentary order from otherwise indifferent forces. With dramatic extravagance that veers toward a fallacious just-so story, we learn that the “wind once blew itself untaught,” and then “Man came to tell it what was wrong”:

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be—
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song—the wind could see.

The line “The wind the wind had meant to be”—with its repetition and monosyllables—seems to force intention and meaning to the brink of tautology (as does the remarkable fifteenth line of the sonnet “Hyla Brook”: “We love the things we love for what they are.”). The phrase “a little through the lips and throat” sounds like a mock advertisement for gum or chewing tobacco. Be that as may be, “the lips and throat” are not the soul or the will but the body acting as small, physical instrument. If the “aim was song,” was it really the wind’s or just our own? The final phrase of the poem “the wind could see” (for it sees nothing) is an example of the way Frost pricks the balloon of our desire to see our aims confirmed by nature or by God.

Frost’s poetry does reflect an interest in other creatures and in their primordial sounds as a source of meaning. The sonnet “The Oven Bird” represents the voice of a stoic creature, surviving and creating meaningful sound in a difficult environment. Frost insisted on creating fresh meaning while working within such traditional and demanding forms as the sonnet or the iambic pentameter line; it reinforced the sense of both tension and limitation that he found challenging and exciting in life. Both indoor and outdoor schooling help in understanding the poem. The song of oven birds rises suddenly and sharply before falling, ending in a repetitive utterance that sounds, suggestively, like “preacher, preacher, preacher.” Darwin describes how oven birds build their nests, which look like human homes, on the ground with both inner and outer chambers. In addition to the North American warbler, Frost also wryly alludes to Darwin’s discussion of the oven bird, from the genus Furnarius, in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin considered it one of those creatures that might eventually reveal the way all species are related. In the same book Darwin discusses the songs of little Hyla frogs, the subject of the sonnet “Hyla Brook” that Frost paired with “The Oven Bird” in Mountain Interval. Frost loved The Voyage of the Beagle (he owned three copies), and the pairing of the two poems reveals the subtle way Frost draws complex material into his poetry without encumbering its aural effect. The sonnet’s octave suggests the rejuvenating power of the oven bird’s song:

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

But as the bird’s song drops, the sonnet turns on the line that begins the concluding sestet: “And comes that other fall we name the fall,” and we learn of the oven bird’s ability to sing when other birds have gone silent by not quite singing:

And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The repetition of “the fall” evokes not only the oncoming season but, wryly, the biblical Fall. But “the fall” is part of the mythology created by our names. The oven bird’s question in “all but words” indicates the superfluousness of words before the power of primordial, creaturely sound. One of the issues raised by the poem is whether our Judeo-Christian stories of loss and redemption can continue to have meaning in a world of common creaturely descent and constant struggle, the world of Darwin. The poem also describes the tension between linear time and cyclical time. And the question so framed is how to interpret such a world, this “diminished thing.” Frost uses the word “thing” and its variant “something” throughout his poetry in a brilliant way that reflects the elusiveness of reality and the inadequacy of our names. Little things in Frost stand as parts or samples reflecting a larger whole: “I believe in what the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole; skirting the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples.” Later, he wrote setting him apart from his modernist contemporaries, “I started calling myself a synecdochist when others called themselves Imagists or Vorticists. . . . Always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing.” Frost no doubt worked in a rhetorical tradition of romantic thought that William Blake announced in the first aphorism of “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an Hour.” But Frost also doubted that a “World,” “Infinity,” or “Eternity” could be found in the facts of the world. Nature’s flux may not reveal “Truth,” but at least, as he wrote, “For once, then, something.”

The importance of sound in Frost extends deep into the realm of human relations. During his years in England, he revealed in letters the emphasis he had begun to place on the dramatic tones of talk and the posturing of the human voice in the creation of meaning. In 1914, he wrote to his former student John Bartlett; “I give you a new definition of a sentence: A sentence is a sound on which other sounds called words may be strung.” He wanted to capture “the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter.” Frost’s insights coincided with an emphasis on drama and speech, recognizing that meaning is created through dialogue and conversation. Meaning is dramatic, and words and sentences are ultimately deeds. Frost liked to “say” poems, not “read” them, because of his emphasis on the dramatic life and flexibility of meaning through sentence sounds and voice posturing. Meaning was not inherent in words alone or beyond them but in the tension between words and the undercurrent of dramatic tones on which the words flowed. Frost saw colloquy and dialogue as a metaphor for the struggle and agon of creation, the creation and destruction of masks and postures in the play of existence. Poems in which characters appear have obscure and different ways of looking at the world—“Mending Wall,” “The Code,” “The Mountain,” “Home Burial”—reveal much more about themselves and their motives through their tone. In the early poem “Revelation,” Frost asserts the limits of masquerade and mystery “Behind light words that tease and flout,” recognizing in the end that “. . . all, from babes that play/At hide-and-seek to God afar,/So all who hide too well away/Must speak and tell us where they are.” And when they speak, it is the tone that speaks and not only the rhetorical postures of words.

Frost’s dramatic poetry finds full development in North of Boston—narratives, dramatic monologues, ballads—all of which really draw on the ancient form of poetic dialogue known as eclogue, a debate between shepherds or rustics that explores the relations of work and play, haves and have-nots, power and fear. The only traditional lyric in North of Boston is “After Apple-Picking”; aside from the stunning dramatic monologue “A Servant to Servants,” all of the other poems are strikingly original hybrids of narrative, lyric, and dialogue that heighten the importance of circumstance and perspective in an ongoing drama of life. The tensions between characters in these poems reveal the instability of hierarchies and the tentativeness of power and control. In “The Tuft of Flowers” of A Boy’s Will, a farmworker whose task is to turn the hay after the mower has cut it asserts the bond between himself and his fellow worker: “ ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,/‘Whether they work together or apart.’ ” A footnote to “Mending Wall” in the first edition of North of Boston stated, “ ‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where the ‘Tuft of Flowers’ in A Boy’s Will laid it down.” Throughout the book, Frost addresses the possibility of shared experience of both work and play among men and women despite an uneasy awareness of life’s challenges and an anxiety about power and lack of equality. Frost enjoyed saying, “I am a great equalitarian. I try to spend most of my time with my equals.” Hardly an egalitarian, Frost nevertheless saw the way in which all human beings participate in what he called the “ritualism of nature,” its outdoor games for mortal stakes. In several of his narrative and eclogue poems, Frost’s most compelling characters are French-Canadian. Frost acknowledged that the character of “the old-stone savage” of “Mending Wall” and Baptiste of “The Ax-Helve” were inspired by a French-Canadian farmer named Napoleon Guay. Lafayette of “A Hundred Collars” enjoys teasing and threatening Professor Magoon (his name is telling) while finding his own wily ways to making a living and garnering power. The fact of the severe racism experienced by French-Canadians (related to a Protestant demonization of Catholics) haunts these poems. The “civilized” Yankee characters in these poems reveal their fears of losing power to their more “savage,” though often shrewder and wise, French-Canadian interlocutors. Unwilling to be sentimental about human nature, Frost depicts cunning and self-deception in all ranges of human life.

The speaker of “Mending Wall,” for example, appears something of a liberal in his disdain of walls, beginning the poem by saying, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” But the speaker is not Frost. Rather, the poem reveals a conflict of “sayings”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” is balanced by the competing line of the neighbor, “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” The irony of the poem becomes apparent when we realize that it is the speaker who initiates the mending, the “re-pairing.” And his own openness appears contradicted by his disdain for hunters who knock the wall down: “The work of hunters is another thing:/I have come after them and made repair/Where they have left not one stone on a stone,/But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,/To please the yelping dogs.” Is the work of hunters “another,” a different sort of, thing from what the “frozen-ground-swell” does subtly to the wall, or just one more thing or force? This vigorous aside unmasks the speaker’s none-toopopulist and egalitarian attitude. His contempt and fear of his neighbor and his desire to maintain his own place in an imagined hierarchy of being lead him to call the French-Canadian “an old-stone savage armed,” a primitive clinging to his relics. But the truth of what this “savage” says is borne out in the drama of the poem. Good fences do make good neighbors because they allow for colloquy while also keeping privacy and individuality. Despite their seemingly different positions, both men are leveled equal by the fact that they play the same “outdoor game,/One on a side,” though it is, as Frost would write later, “play for mortal stakes.”

The survival of home and the future is at stake in Frost’s representation of the conflict between men and women. If love poetry had traditionally involved the address of a single speaker to his absent lover, Frost’s development of a poetry in which women have an equal and great presence may be one of his most important contributions to modern poetry. His portraits of women in “A Servant to Servants” (a dramatic monologue), “The Witch of Coös,” “Home Burial,” “The Fear,” “In the Home Stretch,” or “Wild Grapes” are among the greatest and most complex in English poetry. Often Frost appears to speak through these women, and they are not, as some have argued, merely mad or tricksters but powerful ethical figures who subvert the control and reveal the cruelty of those around them. In “Wild Grapes,” the woman narrator resists the reductive instructions of her brother to hang on to her passions and dreams. She has no desire to let go with the heart, even to the point of uselessness and death. The speaker of a “Servant to Servants” reasons because she suffers, and her story becomes a moving example for the botanizers on her doorstep of a soul attempting to maintain itself despite the curse of heredity and the cruelty of her husband. “The Generations of Men” finds a powerful girl teasing a boy with Hamlet-like cleverness and dissembling—in the game of courtship, she exercises the power of choice. The power of women to choose and control the world as well as the sadness at the loss of that power lurks beneath the masquerades of “The Witch of Coös” and “The Pauper Witch of Grafton.” In its explorations of the mythologies of women and nature, the deceptions and insights of naming, and the limits of human control, “Maple” remains an unacknowledged masterpiece.

Frost’s conception of life as a conversation that refuses closure informs his dramatic dialogues between men and women. Some of the most convincing and disturbing colloquies in Frost occur between men and women, particularly in “Home Burial, ”In the Home Stretch,” “The Fear,” and “The Death of the Hired Man.“ What it means to be human becomes worked out in the conflict of these conversations. In ”The Death of the Hired Man,“ the nature and stability of “home,” itself a metaphor for order, finds meaning only tentatively in the debate between Mary and her husband, Warren. Frost breaks the blank verse line (unrhymed iambic pentameter) across the initial statements of both, allowing each voice to play in variations before falling back into the regular meter that acts as the life pulse. Frost said there are only two meters in English, “strict iambic” and “loose iambic,” and here he demonstrates the way thought plays within the rhythms of ordinary speech but still follows a very regular and powerful cadence that sometimes resists but ultimately falls into the regularity of iambic pentameter:

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?

It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the train.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

This dialogue arrives at different and troubling attitudes toward home as Mary and Warren work out their thoughts in reaction to each other’s cues. But the momentary points of agreement can be destroyed if the wills of the players fail to accommodate each other. That failure is implied in the dark pun of the title of “Home Burial,” one of Frost’s greatest poems. The death of a child makes participation in the ordinary rhythms of life nearly impossible and reveals hidden faults in the souls of a husband and wife. Amy and her husband know how to hurt each other, and the questioning of the reality of each other’s grief becomes a pretext for feardriven displays of power and control. Amy accuses her husband of not knowing how to grieve, while also refusing his attempts to understand her grief. In “Home Burial” great demands are placed on both the characters and the reader to interpret the tone in order to understand what is being said. Is the husband really a brute, treading crudely on his wife’s profound grief over the loss of a child? Or does Amy’s silence and anger reflect grief about her marriage and her husband’s control over her? Each finds ways of destroying the barriers the other creates in an ongoing drama of power. Much depends upon how we take the husband’s tone when he says:

The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

The analogy between the bedroom and the graveyard has inspired much interpretation. Is he clumsy or deliberately and cruelly reminding her of her place in relation to his purposes? Is there a suggestion here about sexual frigidity or a reminder of how this represents his family portrait? Amy had heard her husband say while he was digging the child’s grave, “ ‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day/Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’ ” She assumes he merely speaks of “everyday concerns.” But the tone with which he said it could transform it into a muted and powerful, if not terrifying, metaphor for both his dead child and his marriage—a barrier against the future and against the moral authority of his wife. Amy’s grief is not a mystery but a weapon, a possession, and a barrier she builds while reducing her husband to being crude and subhuman. In retaliation he seems to grant her superiority while simultaneously pointing to her inhumanity: “ ‘Tell me about it if it’s something human./Let me into your grief ” Frost’s quest is to understand in the chaotic and threatening worlds in and outside the home what it means to be human.

Frost enjoyed dialogue and conflict not only from his hatred of the tyranny of utopia but also from a deeper fear of solitude. Two of Frost’s best lyrics, “Mowing” and “After Apple-Picking,” force us to see not only the individual laborer but also the limits and futility of man alone in the universe (one of the laborers uses a “long scythe” and the other a “long two-pointed ladder” as an instrument of perception), straining at the limits with no response from man or God. In “Mowing,” cutting the hay and leaving it “to make”—that is, to dry in the sun—are some of the fundamental forms of farm labor. The poem has been taken as a work about poetry—about the satisfactions of combining work and play through the creation of a comforting sound and rhythm, and this is partly true. But as in almost all of Frost, the expectation and even first appearance of comfort cannot hide what so troubles the laborer’s daydreaming. The loneliness of the speaker is more than apparent in his opening line: “There never was a sound beside the wood but one,/And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.” The image of the cultivated field next to the wood suggests an unhappy Arcadia or garden, one devoid of anything but the man-made sound, incomprehensible even to the laborer himself. If the sonnet often attempts to resolve into comfort or affirmation of love, both are hard-won here. As a figure of the seeker looking for revelation in nature, the poem seems to provide only an ironic echo of the voice crying in the wilderness in Isaiah 40: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field . . . the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of God shall stand forever.” But here the only voice remains the whispering of the laborer’s scythe, an instrument of order and destruction. This garden demands labor, already has technology, and encompasses creation as well as time and death for which the mower himself has often been a metaphor. “Something” keeps the scythe from “speaking,” and we learn that it may be “something about the heat of the sun,” suggestive of the power of the environment and the fact that man must labor by the sweat of his brow. Outdoor schooling tells more. The mower’s “earnest love” lays the swale in rows and cuts down “feeble-pointed spikes of flowers/(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.” To a farmer, the flourishing of flowers represents an ironic curse of cultivation; flowers grow stronger as the cultivation continues. (In “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” the farmer feels cursed that “The very nature of the soil was hot/ /And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,/Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain/Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.”) The flowers represent beauty and frustration. And their “feeble” presence as well as the failure of a “bright green snake” to remain camouflaged suggests the tentative presence of all life forms in a world of randomness and waste. All these “facts” prevent the mower’s “dream” from growing too great, and the speaker arrives at the complex epiphany of acceptance: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” The facts hold only the hint of possible transcendence and are inextricably related to the senses and sensuous experience. The following line continues the action of labor that does not look too far into the future but only to the next step in the process of harvesting: “My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make,” which may be all that can be said or done for the moment. With its unusual rhyme scheme, skeptical tones, and haunting sighing sounds, the poem allows for pain but does not drift into resentment—rather into a hard-won acceptance.

“After Apple-Picking” deepens the questions and fears raised in “Mowing,” as it, too, weds fact and dream in a precarious drama of uncertainty. The exhaustion and acceptance of limits in the pursuit of perfection spur the speaker’s meditation on desire and waste. Here, as in “Mowing,” an irregular rhyme scheme draws the reader forward but underscores the sense of uncertainty and swaying, as do the brilliantly varied line lengths such as “But I was well/Upon my way to sleep before it fell,/And I could tell/What form my dreaming was about to take.” The repetition of sleep four times in the final five lines, as well as the pointed rhyme of the final word “sleep” with “heap,” adds to the ominousness with which the poem concludes. The image of apple-picking invokes the fall of man through desire and knowledge, and the ladder recalls the biblical story of Jacob’s dream of ascending and descending angels, as well as his wrestling with the angel of God. The word “heaven” in the second line is perhaps the only overt indication in the poem that this day’s labor has something to do with the desire to find God or attain grace through labor in the world, a desire doomed to failure because of the inescapable limits of creaturely natures. The ladder had also become a figure for the scale of nature and the possibility of human progress. Swaying as it does in “After Apple-Picking” against the tree, it gives us a sense of man’s precarious position in a vast, nearly inexhaustible world that grows and wastes, in which some are selected and others go to “the cider-apple heap/As of no worth.” What may “trouble” the speaker’s “human” sleep is that it serves no purpose other than to keep him on the ladder in pursuit of perfection, unlike the woodchuck, whose long sleep has at least preserved him in the safety of hibernation.

The fact of waste in creation is something Frost wanted to accept as both the joy and sadness of existence on earth. The motions of such a world do not imply progress but variations within cycles of growth and decay and competition—even among seemingly innocent forms—for a place in the sun.

In “After Apple-Picking” and in “Birches” (as well as “Wild Grapes”), the trees of life and of knowledge combine in a garden that never was and never will be perfect. Moments of skillful play are the best way to create, as he called it, “a momentary stay against confusion.” In “Birches,” the speaker, “weary of considerations,” dreams of such a momentary stay through the boyhood memory of swinging on birch trees. The boy climbs only “Toward heaven,” letting go and returning to earth because “Earth’s the right place for love.” And even though he knows how imperfect love can be—from the excesses of cruelty, selfishness, and desire—he admits, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Frost expresses both the power and limitations of art in the concluding line “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” As a poet, one has rarely done better.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Bagby, George. Robert Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Barron, Jonathan, and Earl Wilcox, eds. Roads Not Taken: Rereading on Robert Frost. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

Brower, Reuben. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Buxton, Rachel. Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Cady, Edwin H., and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Frost. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Cook, Reginald. Robert Frost: A Living Voice. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Faggen, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Gerber, Philip. Robert Frost. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Hall, Dorothy Judd. Contours of Belief. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984.

Hass, Robert Bernard. Going by Contraries: Frost’s Conflict with Science. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Hoffman, Tyler. Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry. Hanover: The University of New England Press, 2001.

Ingebretsen, Ed. Robert Frost’s Star in a Stone-boat: A Grammar of Belief. San Francisco: Catholic Scholars Press, 1994.

Jost, Walter. Rhetorical Investigations. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2004.

Kearns, Katherine. Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kilcup, Karen. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988.

Oster, Judith. Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Hanover: The University of New England Press, 2003.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost and the Work of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Pritchard, William. Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Sheehy, Donald. Poems, Life, Legacy. (CD-ROM) New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Tuten, Nancy, and John Zubizarreta, eds. The Robert Frost Encylopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912—1915. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Wilcox, Earl, ed. Robert Frost: His Incalculable Influence on Others. Victoria: University of Victoria, 1994.

Robert Frost

BornDiedOccupationAlma materNotable worksNotable awardsSpouseChildrenSignature

Robert Frost in 1941

Robert Lee Frost
March 26, 1874
San Francisco, California, US

January 29, 1963 (aged 88)
Boston, Massachusetts, US

Poet, playwright

Dartmouth College
(no degree)
Harvard University
(no degree)

A Boy's Will, North of Boston[1]

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Congressional Gold Medal,

Elinor Miriam White (1895–1938)

• Elliot (1896–1900)
• Lesley (1899–1983)
• Carol (1902–40)
• Irma (1903–67)
• Marjorie (1905–34)
• Elinor Bettina (1907)

---

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech,[2] Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England

Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry[3] He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medalpoet laureate of Vermont

Contents

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early years
  • 1.2 Adult years
  • 1.3 Personal life
• 2 Work
  • 2.1 Style and critical response
  • 2.2 Themes
  • 2.3 Influenced by
  • 2.4 Influenced
• 3 Pulitzer Prizes
• 4 Poet laureate of Vermont
• 5 Nobel prize nominations
• 6 Legacy
• 7 Selected works
  • 7.1 Poetry collections
  • 7.2 Plays
  • 7.3 Prose books
  • 7.4 Letters
  • 7.5 Omnibus volumes
  • 7.6 Spoken word
• 8 See also
• 9 Notes
• 10 Sources
• 11 External links

BiographyEarly years

Robert Frost, circa 1910

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California[2] His mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.

Frost was a descendant of Samuel Applet‎on, one of the early settlers of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Rev. George Phillips, one of the early settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts[4]

Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with The San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts[5] Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian

Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chicarbon arc lamps

Adult years

Robert Frost's 85th birthday in 1959

In 1894, he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of the New York Independent) for $15 ($425 today). Proud of his accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence UniversityGreat Dismal Swamp in Virginia

Frost attended Harvard University[6][7][8] Shortly before his death, Frost's grandfather purchased a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New HampshirePinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire

In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, settling first in BeaconsfieldA Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock poets and Frost's inspiration for "The Road Not Taken"[9]), T. E. Hulme, and Ezra PoundA Boy's Will) and 1914 (North of Boston).

The Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire

In 1915, during World War I, Frost returned to America, where Holt's American edition of A Boy's Will had recently been published, and bought a farm in Franconia, New HampshireThe Frost PlacePhi Beta Kappa at Harvard[10] in 1916. During the years 1917–20, 1923–25, and, on a more informal basis, 1926–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College[11] 

In 1924, he won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for the book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes.[12] He would win additional Pulitzers for Collected Poems in 1931,[13] A Further Range in 1937,[14] and A Witness Tree in 1943.[15]

For forty-two years – from 1921 to 1962 – Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, at its mountain campus at Ripton, VermontNational Historic Landmark[16] In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor[17] The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home was purchased by The Henry Fordcolonial era[18] in 2002 and was given to Bennington College[19]

In 1934, Frost began to spend winter months in Florida.[20] In March 1935, he gave a talk at the University of Miami[20] In 1940, he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.[20] In her memoir about Frost's time in Florida, Helen Muir writes, "Frost had called his five acres Pencil Pines because he said he had never made a penny from anything that did not involve the use of a pencil."[20] His properties also included a house

HarvardPrinceton, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and was the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth CollegeFairfax, VirginiaLawrence, Massachusetts, and the main library of Amherst College

"I had a lover's quarrel with the world." The epitaph engraved on his tomb is an excerpt from his poem "The Lesson for Today."

In 1960, Frost was awarded a United States Congressional Gold Medal, "In recognition of his poetry, which has enriched the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world,"[21] which was finally bestowed by President Kennedy in March 1962.[22] Also in 1962, he was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony[23]

Frost was 86 when he read at the inauguration of John F. KennedyThe Gift Outright[24]

In the summer of 1962, Frost accompanied Interior Secretary Stewart Udall on a visit to the Soviet Union in hopes of meeting Nikita Khrushchev[25][26][27][28]

Frost died in Boston on January 29, 1963 of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph

One of the original collections of Frost materials, to which he himself contributed, is found in the Special Collections department of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts[29] The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a small collection of his papers. The University of Michigan Library holds the Robert Frost Family Collection

Personal life

The Frost family grave in Bennington Old Cemetery

Robert Frost's personal life was plagued by grief and loss. In 1885 when he was 11, his father died of tuberculosiscancerdepression[17]

Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1900, died of cholera); daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983); son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide); daughter Irma (1903–1967); daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal feverbreast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure[17]

WorkStyle and critical response

The poet/critic Randall Jarrell often praised Frost's poetry and wrote, "Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot[30]

Jarrell's notable and influential essays on Frost include the essays "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial' " (1962), which consisted of an extended close reading of that particular poem,[31] and "To The Laodiceans" (1952) in which Jarrell defended Frost against critics who had accused Frost of being too "traditional" and out of touch with Modern or Modernist poetry

U.S stamp, 1974

In Frost's defense, Jarrell wrote "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications—coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his work." And Jarrell's close readings of poems like "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep" led readers and critics to perceive more of the complexities in Frost's poetry.[32][33]

In an introduction to Jarrell's book of essays, Brad Leithauser[34][35]

Jarrell lists a selection of the Frost poems he considers the most masterful, including "The Witch of Coös", "Home Burial", "A Servant to Servants", "Directive", "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep", "Provide, Provide", "Acquainted with the Night", "After Apple Picking", "Mending Wall", "The Most of It", "An Old Man's Winter Night", "To Earthward", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening[36]

From "Birches"[37]

I'd like to get away from earth awhile 
And then come back to it and begin over. 
May no fate willfully misunderstand me 
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away 
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: 
I don't know where it's likely to go better. 
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, 
But dipped its top and set me down again. 
That would be good both going and coming back. 
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost

In 2003, the critic Charles McGrath noted that critical views on Frost's poetry have changed over the years (as has his public image). In an article called "The Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation," McGrath wrote, "Robert Frost ... at the time of his death in 1963 was generally considered to be a New England folkie ... In 1977, the third volume of Lawrance Thompson's biography suggested that Frost was a much nastier piece of work than anyone had imagined; a few years later, thanks to the reappraisal of critics like William H. Pritchard and Harold Bloom and of younger poets like Joseph Brodsky[38]

In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair compared and contrasted Frost's unique style to the work of the poet Edwin Arlington RobinsonThomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats[39][40]

In providing an overview of Frost's style, the Poetry Foundation[41]

An earlier 1963 study by the poet James Radcliffe Squires[42]

The classicist Helen H. BaconBacchae. She cites the certain motifs, including that of the tree bent down to earth, as evidence of his "very attentive reading of Bacchae, almost certainly in Greek." In a later poem, "One More Brevity" (1953), Bacon compares the poetic techniques used by Frost to those of Virgil in the Aeneid. She notes that "this sampling of the ways Frost drew on the literature and concepts of the Greek and Roman world at every stage of his life indicates how imbued with it he was."[43]

Themes

In Contemporary Literary Criticism, the editors state that "Frost's best work explores fundamental questions of existence, depicting with chilling starkness the loneliness of the individual in an indifferent universe."[44] The critic T. K. Whipple focused on this bleakness in Frost's work, stating that "in much of his work, particularly in North of Boston, his harshest book, he emphasizes the dark background of life in rural New England, with its degeneration often sinking into total madness." [44]

In sharp contrast, the founding publisher and editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe[44] She notes his frequent use of rural settings and farm life, and she likes that in these poems, Frost is most interested in "showing the human reaction to nature's processes." She also notes that while Frost's narrative, character-based poems are often satirical, Frost always has a "sympathetic humor" towards his subjects.[44]

Influenced by

• Robert Graves
• Rupert Brooke
• Thomas Hardy[39]
• William Butler Yeats,[39]
• John Keats

Influenced

• Robert Francis
• Seamus Heaney[11]
• Richard Wilbur[11]
• Edward Thomas[45]
• James Wright

Pulitzer Prizes

• 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes
• 1931 for Collected Poems
• 1937 for A Further Range
• 1943 for A Witness Tree

Poet laureate of Vermont

In June 1922 the Vermont State League of Women's Clubs elected Frost as Poet laureate of Vermont. When a New York Times editorial strongly criticised the decision of the Women's Clubs, Sarah Cleghorn[46]

On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet laureate[47][48][49][50]

Nobel prize nominations

Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature[51]

Legacy

Robert Frost Hall at Southern New Hampshire University

• His poem "Fire and Ice" influenced the title and other aspects of George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.[52][53]
• Robert Frost Hall is an academic building at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire[54]

Selected worksPoetry collections

• A Boy's Will (David Nutt 1913; Holt, 1915)[55]
• North of Boston (David Nutt, 1914; Holt, 1914)
  • "After Apple-Picking"
  • "The Death of the Hired Man"
  • "Mending Wall"
• Mountain Interval (Holt, 1916)
  • "Birches"
  • "Out, Out"
  • "The Oven Bird"
  • "The Road Not Taken"
• Selected Poems (Holt, 1923)

Includes poems from first three volumes and the poem The Runaway

• New Hampshire (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924)
  • "Fire and Ice"
  • "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
  • "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
• Several Short Poems (Holt, 1924)[2]
• Selected Poems (Holt, 1928)
• West-Running Brook (Holt, 1928? 1929)
  • "Acquainted with the Night"
• The Lovely Shall Be Choosers, The Poetry Quartos, printed and illustrated by Paul Johnston (Random House, 1929)
• Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1930; Longmans, Green, 1930)
• The Lone Striker (Knopf, 1933)
• Selected Poems: Third Edition (Holt, 1934)
• Three Poems (Baker Library, Dartmouth College, 1935)
• The Gold Hesperidee (Bibliophile Press, 1935)
• From Snow to Snow (Holt, 1936)
• A Further Range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
• Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1939; Longmans, Green, 1939)
• A Witness Tree (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943)
  • "The Gift Outright"
  • "A Question"
  • "The Silken Tent"
• Come In, and Other Poems (Holt, 1943)
• Steeple Bush (Holt, 1947)
• Complete Poems of Robert Frost, 1949 (Holt, 1949; Cape, 1951)
• Hard Not To Be King (House of Books, 1951)
• Aforesaid (Holt, 1954)
• A Remembrance Collection of New Poems (Holt, 1959)
• You Come Too (Holt, 1959; Bodley Head, 1964)
• In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)
• The Poetry of Robert Frost (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1969)

Plays

• A Way Out: A One Act Play (Harbor Press, 1929).
• The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).
• A Masque of Reason (Holt, 1945).
• A Masque of Mercy (Holt, 1947).

Prose books

• The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963; Cape, 1964).
• Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, by Margaret Bartlett Anderson (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).
• Selected Letters of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
• Interviews with Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966; Cape, 1967).
• Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost (State University of New York Press, 1972).
• Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship (University Press of New England, 1981).
• The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen (Harvard University Press, January 2007). [3]

Letters

• Frost, Robert (February 2014). Sheehy, Donald; Richardson, Mark; Faggen, Robert, eds. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1, 1886–1920. Belknap PressISBN 978-0674057609 (Harvard University Press imprint; 811 pages; first volume, of five, of the scholarly edition of the poet's correspondence, including many previously unpublished letters.)
• Frost, Robert (September 2016). Sheehy, Donald; Richardson, Mark; Haas, Robert Bernard; Atmore, Henry, eds. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2, 1920–1928. Belknap PressISBN 978-0674726642 (Harvard University Press imprint; 848 pages; second volume of the series.)

Omnibus volumes

• Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (Richard PoirierLibrary of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-883011-06-2

Spoken word

• Robert Frost Reads His Poetry, Caedmon Records, 1957, TC1060

Notes

• ^ "Robert Frost"The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 18 February 2015.
• ^ Jump up to: a b "Robert Frost". Encyclopædia Britannica (Online ed.). 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-21.
• ^ Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine, Bridget Broderick, and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. p110
• ^ Watson, Marsten. Royal Families - Americans of Royal and Noble Ancestry. Volume Three: Samuel Applet‎on and His Wife Judith Everard and Five Generations of Their Descendants. 2010
• ^ Ehrlich, Eugene; Carruth, Gorton (1982). The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. vol. 50. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503186-5
• ^ Nancy Lewis Tuten; John Zubizarreta (2001). The Robert Frost encyclopediaISBN 978-0-313-29464-8Halfway through the spring semester of his second year, Dean Briggs released him from Harvard without prejudice, lamenting the loss of so good a student.
• ^ Jay Parini (2000). Robert Frost: A LifeISBN 978-0-8050-6341-7
• ^ Jeffrey Meyers (1996). Robert Frost: a biographyFrost remained at Harvard until March of his sophomore year, when he decamped in the middle of a term ...
• ^ Orr, David (2015-08-18). The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets WrongISBN 9780698140899
• ^ "PHI BETA KAPPA AUTHORS". The Phi Beta Kappa Key. 6 (4): 237–240. 1926. JSTOR 42914052
• ^ Jump up to: a b c "Resource: Voices & Visions". www.learner.org. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "The 1924 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry"Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "The 1931 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry"Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "The 1937 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry"Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "The 1943 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry"Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "A Brief History of the Bread Loaf School of English"Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Retrieved February 11, 2018.
• ^ Jump up to: a b c Frost, Robert (1995). Poirier, Richard; Richardson, Mark, eds. Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. The Library of America. 81. New York: Library of America. ISBN 1-883011-06-X.
• ^ [1]
• ^ Robert Frost Stone House Museum, Bennington College
• ^ Jump up to: a b c d Muir, Helen (1995). Frost in Florida: a memoir. Valiant Press. pp. 11, 17. ISBN 0-9633461-6-4.
• ^ Office of the Clerk – U.S. House of Representatives, Congressional Gold Medal Recipients
• ^ Parini, JayRobert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and CompanyISBN 9780805063417
• ^ "The MacDowell Colony – Medal Day". Retrieved 2015-07-02.
• ^ "John F. Kennedy: A Man of This Century". CBS. November 22, 1963.
• ^ "The Poet - Politician - JFK The Last Speech"JFK The Last Speech. Retrieved 2018-10-25.
• ^ Udall, Stewart L. (1972-06-11). "Robert Frost's Last Adventure"archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2018-10-25.
• ^ "When Robert Frost met Khrushchev"Christian Science Monitor. 2008-04-08. ISSN 0882-7729. Retrieved 2018-10-25.
• ^ Schachter, Aaron (2018-08-10). "Remembering John F. Kennedy's Last Speech"All Things Considered. Retrieved 2018-10-25.
• ^ "Robert Frost Collection"the original. Retrieved 2009-03-28.
• ^ Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
• ^ Jarrell, Randall (1999) [1962]. "On 'Home Burial'"English Department at the University of Illinois. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
• ^ Jarrell, Randall. "To The Laodiceans." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
• ^ Jarrell, Randall. "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial.'" No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
• ^ Leithauser, Brad. "Introduction." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
• ^ Nelson, Cary (2000). Anthology of Modern American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 84. ISBN 0-19-512270-4
• ^ Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." No Other Book: Selected Essays. HarperCollins, 1999.
• ^ "Birches by Robert Frost"The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 18 February 2015.
• ^ McGrath, Charles. "The Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation." The New York Times Magazine. 15 June 2003.
• ^ Jump up to: a b c Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition. New York: Norton, 1988.
• ^ Faggen, Robert (2001). Editor (First ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• ^ "Robert Frost"Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. 2018-03-21. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ Squires, Radcliffe. The Major Themes of Robert Frost, The University of Michigan Press, 1963. pp. 106-107.
• ^ Bacon, Helen. "Frost and the Ancient Muses." The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 75-99
• ^ Jump up to: a b c d Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine, Bridget Broderick, and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. p 110–129.
• ^ Poetry Foundation – Edward Thomas Bio
• ^ Robert Frost (2007). The Collected Prose of Robert FrostISBN 978-0-674-02463-2
• ^ Nancy Lewis Tuten; John Zubizarreta (2001). The Robert Frost EncyclopediaISBN 978-0-313-29464-8
• ^ Deirdre J. Fagan (1 January 2009). Critical Companion to Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to His Life and WorkISBN 978-1-4381-0854-4
• ^ Vermont. Office of Secretary of State (1985). Vermont Legislative Directory and State Manual: Biennial sessionJoint Resolution R-59 of the Acts of l96l named Robert Lee Frost as Vermont's Poet Laureate. While not a native Vermonter, this eminent American poet resided here throughout much of his adult ...
• ^ Vermont Legislative Directory and State ManualThe position was created by Joint Resolution R-59 of the Acts of 1961, which designated Robert Frost state poet laureate.
• ^ Nomination Database Robert Frost
• ^ "George R.R. Martin: "Trying to please everyone is a horrible mistake""www.adriasnews.com. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "Five Fascinating Facts about Game of Thrones"Interesting Literature. 2014-05-06. Retrieved 2018-03-22.
• ^ "History". Retrieved September 6, 2017.
• ^ "Robert Frost. 1915. A Boy's Will"www.bartleby.com. Retrieved 2018-03-22.

Sources

• Pritchard, William H. (2000). "Frost's Life and Career" (http). Retrieved March 18, 2001.
• Taylor, Welford Dunaway (1996). Robert Frost and J.J. Lankes: Riders on Pegasus. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Library. ASIN B0006FAO4Q
• Burlington Free Press
• Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. 10/1995 Library of America. Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Trade ISBN 1-883011-06-X[4]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Robert Frost.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Robert Frost

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Frost

• Profile and poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Robert Frost, profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile at Modern American Poetry
• Richard Poirier (Summer–Fall 1960). "Robert Frost, The Art of Poetry No. 2"The Paris Review.
• Robert Frost Collection in Special Collections, Jones Library, Amherst, MA
• Robert Frost Collection in Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
• Robert Frost at Bread Loaf (Middlebury College)
• The Victor E. Reichert Robert Frost Collection from the University at Buffalo Libraries Poetry Collection
• Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH
• The Frost Foundation
• The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference center in Franconia, N.H.
• Robert Frost reading his poems at Harper Audio (recordings from 1956)
• Yale College Lecture on Robert Frost audio, video and full transcripts of Open Yale Courses
• Works by Robert Frost at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Robert (Robert Lee) Frost at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Robert Frost at Internet Archive
• Works by Robert Frost at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
• Robert Frost Collection at Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
• Robert Frost Declares Himself a "Balfour Israelite" and Discusses His Trip to the Western Wall