1. The Poetry of Robert Frost

2. Robert Frost ( )
Most popular American poet of the 20th century.
Most Americans recognize his name and best-known poems
Both popularly and critically acclaimed
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times

3. Early Life Born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874.
His father, a journalist and local politician, died when Frost was eleven years old.
His Scottish mother was a schoolteacher.
The family lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with Frost's paternal grandfather.
In 1892 Frost graduated from a high school and attended Dartmouth College for a few months.
Over the next ten years he held a number of jobs

4. Early Career
"My Butterfly" published in the New York Independent and he had five poems privately printed.
Worked as a teacher and published his poems in magazines.
Studied at Harvard , but left without a degree.

5. Marriage and Family In 1895 he married Elinor White
a former schoolmate, and co-valedictorian
they had six children.
Their first child, Elliot, was born on September 29, 1896 but died from cholera, in July of 1900
the first of many family tragedies that Frost would endure.

6. Dark Years
They had five more children—one son and four daughters, the last of whom lived for only three days
Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900
His grandfather died in He left Frost:
a yearly annuity of $500.00
the use of his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for a period of ten years, after which Robert would become its owner.

7. A Risky Move
His popular image is as a farmer-poet, but he only worked seriously at it for a few years.
Supported his family working as a teacher
Sold the farm in 1911 when it became his, and moved his family to England in August 1912, hoping to find there the literary success that had eluded him in his own country.

8. Success Abroad
There he published his first collection of poems, A Boy's Will(1913) followed by North of Boston (1914), which gained international reputation.
Frost met numerous literary figures, including Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats (who tells Pound that A Boy's Will is "the best poetry written in America for a long time").
The collection contains some of Frost's best- known poems: "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile."

9. The New American Genius
After returning to the US in 1915, Frost bought a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire.
There, his wife Elinor suffered a miscarriage.
1916: Frost began teaching at Amherst College
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire in May.
Receives Honorary Litt.D. degrees from Middlebury College and Yale University.
Gives notice to Amherst of his acceptance of lifetime appointment at University of Michigan as Fellow in Letters.

10. Tragedy and Depression
Behind the largely unruffled public facade was a personal life of great stress and sorrow.
His daughters Lesley and Irma underwent unhappy marriages and painful divorces
Irma was at one point committed to a mental hospital, as Frost's sister had been some years earlier.
1925: Daughter Marjorie is hospitalized suffering from pneumonia, a peri-cardiac infection, chronic appendicitis and nervous exhaustion.
Marjorie, in many ways the favorite of her parents, died shortly after the birth of her first child in 1934, a loss from which neither Frost nor his wife ever fully recovered.

11. Tragedy and Depression
His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his children.
Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide.
Frost also suffered from depression and the continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

12. A Poet Who Terrifies
None of these traumatic experiences found their way directly into Frost's poetry.
At a far remove from the confessional tendencies of many later American poets, he did not see his art as a form of therapy.
But these experiences, and the sense of helplessness and self-recrimination that many of them bred, inevitably worked to shape and color the views of life's possibilities and its limits that inform his work.

13. The Darker Side
To the broad public, Frost may be a painter of charming postcard scenes and a front-porch philosopher dispensing consolation and cracker-barrel wisdom, but behind these stereotypes there is in Frost's work a tragic and (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) a terrifying poet, whose deepest note is one of inevitable human isolation.

14. A Venerated Poet
The capstone of his public career was his appearance at John F. Kennedy's Presidential inauguration in January
When the sun and the wind prevented him from reading his new poem, 'The Preface', Frost recited his old poem, 'The Gift Outright', from memory.

15. A Venerated Poet
Over the years he received a remarkable number of literary and academic honors.
Among the honors and rewards Frost received were tributes from the U.S. Senate (1950), the American Academy of Poets (1953), New York University (1956), and the Huntington Hartford Foundation (1958), the Congressional Gold Medal (1962), the Edward MacDowell Medal (1962).
In 1930 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Amherst College appointed him Simpson Lecturer for Life (1949), and in 1958 he was made poetry consultant for the Library of Congress.

16. A Venerated Poet
Kennedy also sent him to the Soviet Union as a sort of cultural envoy in 1962, not long before Frost's death in a Boston hospital on January 29, 1963, eight weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
At the time of his death, Frost was regarded as a kind of unofficial poet laureate of the United States

17. Frost’s Legacy
"I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world," Frost once said.
His independent, elusive, half humorous view of the world produced such remarks as "I never take my side in a quarrel", or "I'm never serious except when I'm fooling."

18. Frost’s Legacy
Later biographers have created a complex and contradictory portrait of the poet.

19. Frost’s Legacy
In Lawrance Thompson's humorless, three- volume official biography ( ) Frost was presented as a misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in.
Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries.

20. Frost’s Legacy
While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end

22. Not a Nature Poet
Frost has often been referred to as a “nature” poet because so many of his poems are set in rural or pastoral surroundings
Frost said that he had only written one poem without a man in it
Nature, for Frost, was an arena for action

23. Aspects of Frost's poetry:
using contraries and contradictions
using common, everyday speech
poems set in nature
deep meanings exist beneath a simple exterior

24. A Modern Poet
uses ordinary speech within formal patterns of line and stanza
uses traditional forms and structures while exploring modern themes of alienation and isolation
Frost believed that the poet's response to modern life was to revert back to traditional forms which provided a sense of order

25. Motifs in Frost's Poetry:
the cycle of the seasons
the alternation of night and day
natural phenomenon
rural images

26. A Poet Who Terrifies
The literary critic Lionel Trilling called Frost “a poet who terrifies.”
Often in Frost’s poems, there exists a subtle undertone of fear or uneasiness – a “hinting” at something dark or dangerous
This juxtaposition of the calm, often rural, peaceful surface with an underlying darkness is not uncommon in Frost’s poetry
He uses these “contraries” or “opposites” often in his poetry

27. Frost Quotations “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
“The best way out is always through.”
“One of the hardest things to accept as just is a called third strike.” Perfect Day -- a Day of Prowess
“…some baseball is the fate of us all. For my part, I am never more at home in America than at a baseball game…”

28. Assignment: Due Next Wednesday
Find an article, preferably an opinion piece, written about Frost. Read the article and then:
1) Write an MLA citation for the article
2) Write a rhetorical precis (pink handout)

29. ”A Lover’s Quarrel with the World”
As you watch the video, keep notes in two columns:
Information and things said about Frost
Your responses to the clips of him personally