Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” remains one of my personal favorites in spite of many years of literary study. The advice of this poem has helped me to understand that when I choose atypical paths it creates a ripple effect that produces differences so profound I can hardly imagine my life without that nonstandard choice. However, I had to realize on my own that every choice has the capacity to become such a divergence. With this realization comes a certain weight to daily choices, and anything beyond that calls for careful thought and planning. The world is full of uncertainties, but assiduous preparation can produce wise choices that lead to the fulfillment of long term goals.…
Dating back to as far as the epic of Gilgamesh, literature has explored the most prevalent aspect of human existence, journeys. Everything is a journey in life; we go through journeys to discover things about ourselves and the world around us. It’s said that to truly learn something you have to do it yourself, but we don’t have the time to go on enough journeys to quench our cravings for answers. That’s why literature has offered us the chance to learn something, without actually doing it, so that we can learn the message from a journey, without actually going on it.…
Frost is an important writer due to the fact that he helped renew popular interest in American poetry by refusing to write with the academic modernist style used at the time, he chose to be different. Frost wrote about nature and rural life in a traditional yet complex way that grabbed the interest of many people. Some of his best works that I particularly like include “The Road Not Taken”, “Home Burial”, and “Fire and Ice”. These poems Frost wrote helped form the conception of Americans as tough, self-sufficient individuals. “Home Burial” was about the overwhelming grief after the death of a child. Frost knew and experienced this first hand due to the loss of quite a few people. “Fire and Ice” considers the apocalyptic end of the world.…
Critics raved about Robert Frost in the 19th and 20th century. Additionally, there was such a sufficient amount of positive feed that it was hard to find bits of criticism. Robert Frost’s awards consist of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the United States Poet Laureate, a Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Frost was obviously a successful and gifted writer, however, even the best writers have their blemishes.…
Robert Frost was an American poet that first became known after publishing a book in England. He soon came to be one of the best-known and loved American poets ever. He often wrote of the outdoors and the three poems that I will compare are of that “outdoors” type.…
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. His family moved to New England when he was eleven; he became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He earned his formal degree at the arguably the most prestigious University, Harvard. He later worked through various occupations, ranging from teacher to editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, “My Butterfly”, was published on November 8, 1894, in The Independent newspaper. In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."…
Robert Frost’s approach to human isolation is always an interesting exploration. His poem of desertion and neglect paired with eternal hopefulness ignite the reader in his poem “The Census-Taker.” All of the elements of a Frost poem are in this particular poem. “The Census-Taker” must be from an earlier time in Frost’s career because the poem is written in an open, free verse similar to the style of his earlier 20th century poetry like “Mending Wall” and “After Apple-Picking.” Also, the language lacks the sophisticated word selection a reader of poetry might find in Wallace Stevens and instead uses simplicity to elaborate the story. As Frost matures, his poetry becomes more structured in an identifiable, categorical style with systematic stanzas and perfectly paired couplets. Some verses in “The Census-Taker” carry unstressed and stressed syllables, which echo the seemingly similar attempt in “The Wood Pile” at flawed iambic pentameter. In addition, Frost places himself in the poem, as the sharp first person narrative, simply passing through a nearby wood to perform his job duties. The poem is cognitive. My favorite element of Frost poetry that he purports in “The Census-Taker” is his use of the chiasmus. Something there is in Robert Frost that does love a chiasmus, mainly those designed to teach a moral point. Specifically, however, the poem revolves around the actions of the census-taker. It is an autumn evening in New England. He intrudes a poorly kept, abandoned home where there is no one to intrude on. Paradoxically, he attempts to count the people who are not there. The census-taker realizes after many hours that this house is the only evidence of civilization for many miles surrounded by cliffs. The windy evening meets the neglected, dilapidated home only to shake creaky walls. At one point, the census-taker feels compelled to scoop an…
Like so many artists, Frost drew from his personal experiences as inspiration for his poetry. Frost is described by biographers as having “links between the events of Frost’s own life – a gothic chronicle of disasters – and the poetry”. (McQuade et al., 1999, p. 1901) Frost lost his father at a very early age. He was only 11 year old at the time of his father’s death. “But it was not only the early death of his father that convinced Frost of the evil in existence. His own first child died in infancy; his only son committed suicide; one daughter died after childbirth, and another was mentally ill; his embittered wife refused on her deathbed to admit him to her room”. (McQuade et al., 1999, p. 1901) Frost experienced a great deal of loss throughout his life and that loss is reflected in his work. That loss, however, is not always easily uncovered. Frost often masked the pain in his writings with symbolism and metaphors.…
Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California where his father worked as a newspaper editor. This may have been where Robert was first exposed to the aspect of writing. Robert’s first published poem was in a school newspaper at the age of 16 where he wrote a poem on the subject of Cortez in Mexico. Although he attended Dartmouth for seven weeks and spent two years at Harvard, he never finished a college education with a degree. After he had gotten married, he worked as a schoolteacher, and during this period is when he spent time writing the majority of his poetry. After his teaching career, he moved to England to pursue getting his works published since his poetry was not accepted for publishing in America. His first two books of poems, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, were published in England and then later in America due to the overwhelming popularity of them in England (Greenberg ix-x).…
Born in March 26, 1874 Frost grew up in San Francisco, California with a younger brother and his two parents. Stricken with tragedy, Frost’s younger brother died of tuberculosis when Robert was only the age of eleven. His mother, not being able to take the tragic scene fled back to their hometown where he enrolled in high school. During his high school years, Robert became fond of writing and joined the high school newspapers. While writing, Frost ended up publishing his first poem ever in the high school newspaper which definitely got his mind started.…
During his life, Robert Frost, the icon of American literature, wrote many poems that limned the picturesque American Landscape. His mostly explicated poems “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” reflect his young manhood in the rural New England. Both of these poems are seemingly straightforward but in reality, they deal with a higher level of complexity and philosophy. Despite the difference in style and message, “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are loaded with vivid imagery and symbolism that metaphorically depict the return to the nature and childhood, the struggle between reality and imagination, and also freedom and captivation.…
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26th, 1874. Frost’s father was a journalist whose drinking habits let to an early death by tuberculosis in 1885 at the age of 34. After his death, Frost’s mother moved to the family to Massachusetts where Frost graduated in 1892 as one of the two valedictorians from Lawrence High School. His co-valedictorian was his future wife, Elinor Miriam White. After…
Guiding Question: What do the speakers of Frost’s poems reveal about themselves through the stories they tell?…
Robert Frost endured many emotional hardships in his life. Some of the most significant and tragic, are the many deaths in his immediate family. By the time Frost was 27, he had lost both of his parents, his son Elliott, as well as his grandfather, the man who had served as a surrogate father to him after the death of his own father when he was only 11. By the time Frost was 62, he was forced to commit his sister Jeanie to a mental hospital. He had also lost three more of his seven children (one to a miscarriage), as well as his wife Elinor, the love of his life. Five years later, his son Carol committed suicide.…
Born on the day of March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, Robert Lee Frost was one of America’s most famous poets. Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes before he died in 1963. The first one in 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, then in1931 for Collected Poems, in 1937 for A Further Range, and the last on in 1943 for A Witness Tree. Married to Elinor Miriam White, who was his co-valedictorian at high school, he lived in various locations throughout his life, in San Francisco, California for the first ten years of his life, then moved to New England where he lived most of his years; he also lived in Great Britain for three years where he met Edward, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a review of Frost's work; it was also in England that Frost wrote some of his best work. Robert Frost attended Dartmouth College, where he stayed for a little over a semester, and also Harvard University for two years. He was awarded honorary Litt. D. from Harvard, Bates College, Oxford, Cambridge, National University of Ireland, and Amherst College, and was also the first to be awarded an LL.D. from Dartmouth College (Gerber Chronology). In Robert Frost’s poems, the main themes usually had to do with nature such as: death, evil, creation, design, choices in life, and responsabilities. This is seen in the poems “The Road not Taken,” “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Acquainted With the Night,” “Mending Wall,” “Gathering Leaves” and “Design.”…