By: Anooj Patel “No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost”(Thompson, Lawrence).

 Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco  After 12 Years, his father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died From TB.  He and his mother, along with his sister, moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.

 He went to high school there, where he met his future love, Elinor White.  After he graduated high school, he went to Dartmouth University for several months. He ended up leaving.  He got his first poem published in a New York journal. The poem was “My Butterfly: an Elegy”  He ended up proposing to Elinor, but he got rejected. He later tried again and they ended up getting married and having a child, named Elliot.

 Frost moved his family to a farm in New Hampshire where they attempted to settle down and live a slightly modest life.  Though they attempted to make a family, they had many issues as 2 of their children developed mental illnesses and 2 of them died.  Despite their hardships, Frost ended up setting into the farm life and began writing poems about the countryside.  Issues arose as only 2 of his poems were actually able to be published.

 In 1912, they both decide to move to England in search for publishers that were looking for new poets.  He luckily finds a publisher, which he sticks with throughout his life time.  His fame rises as he meets other famous poets until war breaks out in  In hopes of evading the war, Frost and his wife leave for the US in  On his return to the US, he was overwhelmed in popularity.

 He bought a farm again in New Hampshire and settles down.  For 45 Years he writes poems and lectures on and off at universities such as Dartmouth and University of Michigan.  Over his lifespan, he earned many honorary awards.  He sadly died on January 29, 1963

 He received 4 Pulitzer Prizes in 1923, 1931, 1937, and  He offered to recited his poem, “ The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration address. He accepted to recite it.  He earned 40 honorary degrees from various different universities.

 Fire And Ice  The Road Not Taken Nothing Gold Can Stay  Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening  Mending Wall  Acquainted With the Night  Birches  After Apple-Picking

 His exact style is very difficult to pin point from his poems  He uses an extensive amount of symbols within his poetry  His writing style is a combination of 20 th century modernism and 19 th century Romanticism  He rears away from standard modernistic writing style unlike his contemporaries.

 He avoided “artificial” poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft spoken New Englander.  Frost’s belief was to write with common experience but uncommon in expression.  Frost used nature to illustrate the human psychological day to day feelings.  In his poems, he uses a good deal of imagery to further depict the scenario the protagonist is in. His imagery was in all forms.

Summary:  When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been “swinging” them.  He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree’s crest to the ground.  He used to do this himself and dreams of going back to those days. He likens birch swinging to getting “away from the earth awhile” and then coming back.

 Themes prevalent within the poem:  Alienation: Felt by the boys, trees and the narrator.  Estrangement: Seen again with the boy and even the narrator.  Journey of Life: Frost, like in other poems, uses nature (the woods) as a metaphor. In this case, he describes the path of life to a journey through woods.

 A Major symbol with this poem, is the Birches  They represent the alienation that humans feel physiologically, as these birches are in competition with the other “straighter, darker trees.”  Another important symbol is the boy, that the narrator imagines. The boy represents the destruction, and self destruction that is formed from this estrangement that he feels.

 ”the iced branches shed ‘crystal shells’” Here Frost uses visual imagery.  “It's when I'm weary of considerations/ And life is too much like a pathless wood, “ He uses a form of organic imagery.  “Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs ” Another use of tactile imagery.

 Summary:  The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through woods.  He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing. After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one day in order to try the other road.  However, he realizes that it is unlikely that he will ever have the opportunity to come back to this specific point in time because his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and other decisions).  The narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he chosen the other path.

 Theme: Individualism: The Narrator is forced to come up with a decision on the spot for which road to take.  Symbols:  Narrator’s Interaction: Frost takes the simple idea of choosing a path, in which both are similar, and relating it under the text to a decision making many of us face today.  The “Ruts” in the road: Frost uses these ruts to symbolize the past egoists who pasted before him and placed the ruts into the earth.

 Imagery: “long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;” “And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.”

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