ROBERT LEE FROST AMERICAN POET

Introduction Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on march 26th 1874 to William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. He spent a large part of his life in the countryside in New England, the area which provided the landscape and inspiration for his poetry. The way his regional poetry is written is a part of its meaning. He graduated from Lawrence High school in 1892. In 1890, his poem La Noche Triste was published in the Lawrence High school Newspaper. He attended Darmouth College in New Hampshire in 1892 and later attended Harvard University. However Frost left the university to support his family and to write poetry. He died in Boston on 29th January 1963.

Cont.….. His first professional poem “My Butterfly : an elegy” was published in 1894. He married Elinor Miriam White in 1895. He never got a regular degree though he was later to have 16 honorary degrees. He was in turn teacher, cobbler, editor of local newspaper Lawrence Sentinel and finally farmer. He moved to England in 1912 where his first book of verse was published.

Poetry Collections A Boy’s Will 1913 North of Boston 1914 - Mending Wall - After Apple-Picking Mountain Interval 1916 - Birches New Hampshire - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Cont. West Running Brook 1928 A Further Range 1936 - Design A Witness Tree 1942 A Masque of Reason 1945 Steeple Bush 1947 - Directive A Masque of Mercy 1947 In the Clearing 1962

Poetic Style There is simplicity in his poems. He himself said “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom”. His poems are about the daily activities of his pastoral characters – mending a wall, apple picking, watching snow fall in the wood, mowing – which he transforms into moments of mystical significance. Beneath the deceptive simplicity of content and expression there are symbolic meanings. Frost uses nature as metaphor. Nature could be both generous and malicious to the human world. Frost’s treatment of nature is different from wordsworth who sees nature as the guardian of his heart.

Cont. Frost’s poetic language - Blank Verse - Iambic Pentameter - Colloquial Language - Conversational Tone - Prosody and ‘The Sound of Sense’ - Parenthesis, Dots and Dashes

Cont. Frost as a modern poet - His poetry describes the disintegration of values in modern life. Most of poems deal with personal suffering from loneliness and disillusionment. - The symbolic technique in his poems is also very modern in nature. - He uses pastoral technique only to comment on the modern lifestyle. Robert Frost as a lyric poet - The bulk of his poetry consists of lyrics. He has written both kinds of lyrics, the pure lyrics and the dramatic lyrics and in both the varieties he writes shorter and longer verses. - ‘Frost is at his best and purest in the lyrics’