Robert Frost - an Analysis of His Works.

English 1B

April 14th, 2007.

Poetry Research Paper.

Robert Frost – An Analysis Of His Works.

Robert Frost is the kind of author who celebrates simple, everyday things like rural happenings, with vivid imagery. He delves into the mystery of existence, and, in many of his texts, we see a struggle against chaos. Frost 's poems mostly are centered on a naturalistic theme – "beauties and terrors of nature, conflicts between individual desires and social obligations, and the value of labor." 1 Though one can question the link between nature and aspects such as labor, a more zoomed-out look of the world tells us that the activities of human beings are also a part of nature, and analyzing human behavior and the society of human beings can be perceived as a way of studying nature itself.

Frost 's Early works - Frost has always been considered as a modern American poet, but many say that it is impossible to "place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." 2 This was because his writing was unique and unconventional – it was different from what his contemporaries accepted to be poetry during the turn of the twentieth century. His works did not interest the American publishers in 1912. This made him, along with his family, to move to Buckinghamshire, England in 1912, where he met famous literary figures such as Ezra Pound. He also released his first major collection of verse in 1913, after moving to England, and this was named "A Boy 's Will." A year later, his second publication, "north of Boston," was underway. This volume contained one of

his best works, "Mending Wall." Mending Wall was a "meditation on individualism and community inspired by the annual springtime ritual of repatching walls of rock that divide New England farms." 1. Frost 's works are often described as meditative or ruminative. He deals with themes which were related to the everyday world, but his works allowed the reader to view normal and everyday things of the world, like fire, water, birds, or any other element of nature, and even obscure and dubious subjects like heaven, the unknown "bliss" and paradise, in a way they have not been seen before. Some critics say this is not a different way of viewing things but simply his (Frost 's) way of viewing things. Nevertheless, a poet needs uniqueness to be established.

Frost 's Later years - Through the years, more experimentation and exploration changed Frost 's outlook towards the world. He becomes more societal and less analytical. He becomes more of a free-thinking person than he was before, and develops a broader perspective about himself, and the world around him. He often discusses about the world of men, politics, science, and any other worldly topic that interested him, and were common between him and his readers. However, many of his works dealing with nature continued to awe the readers. Because of his uncanny ability to take the reader right to the place that is being discussed in his poems, his poems like "Spring Pools" and "Tree at My Window" are still celebrated by many readers. "To Frost, metaphor is really what poetry is all about. He is notably a poet of metaphors more than anything else." 3

Meter and Form- Throughout his life, though his topics of interests underwent a change, Frost always adhered himself to the conventional methods of writing poetry. They liberated him from the burden of being an experimentalist. Frost, as he says it

himself in his essay "The Constant Symbol" stuck to regular verses, followed the rules and conventions of metrical writing. He never ventured into the territories of free verse, like many of his fellow-poets were doing. He maintained the line-length and rhyme scheme in each and every one of his poems, and he claimed that the "freshness" of a poem comes out of not thinking to set it to verse. He developed his own theory called "sentence-sounds." According to him, poetry is "less the craft of images — of vision — than the craft of sentences." This piece of information has been gathered from his essays and his notebooks (which were called "laboratory" by Robert Faggen, a Frost Scholar) and his use of this theory can also be seen in his poems. "Although poets certainly talk a great deal about aural effects, Frost meant something more complicated: the quality of intonation in song. In one notebook, he writes, "The sentence ... almost seems the soul of a certain set of words." 4

Frost 's poems always had a New England dialect to it, and though this could have been a result of his upbringing, many critics believe that the similarity between his sentence structuring and New England 's local dialect was simply coincidental. The sentence structuring stems out not from his background or cultural surrounding, but from his want to make the words give a stronger and clearer image to the reader. He wanted the words of his poem to be in harmony with the poet 's mood, and the topic the poet deals with. One of his most analyzed works, which deals with the structuring of the words in his poems, is "The Death of the Hired Man." In this poem, an entire conversation between a farmer and his wife, according to Ezra Pound, is "very different from the

'natural ' speech of the newspapers, and of many professors." ( Literature Resource Center – Robert Frost).

Frost 's view of nature gave many critics an insight into his regional representation. He did not, in any way, belong to a particular region, at least when it comes to influencing his poems. He was a realist, and the triggers to his poems were solely nature, and this did not have anything to do with the place he stayed in. After all, nature was everywhere, and Frost was amused by simple things like a grasshopper sitting on a blade of grass. Though Frost 's works were highly acclaimed, as he grew older, his works became less and less enjoyable to the readers. This could have been a result of the change in Frost 's mentality, and his outlook towards the world, but also could have been because of the change in taste of the people – the readers wanted something different from the poets, different from what they have been reading all these years. Many critics go further in criticizing Frost by talking about his "simplistic philosophy" and "failure to delve deeply into thematic concerns." Some critics even go to the extent of telling that Frost was mainly focused about himself, and his immediate surroundings, like his neighbors, or with the Americans in his neighborhood. ( Literature Resource Center – Robert Frost). However, there are always people who have liked Frost, and will continue to read his works, analyzing them, saying that where his poems arise from – they begin with emotional feelings, like being surprised, or feeling remorse.

Works Cited

1: Frost, Robert. Literature Resource Center "Sidelights" 16th April, 2007.< http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=rock89639&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13033641&n=10&docNum=H1100190000&ST=Robert+Frost&bConts=278191 >

2: Frost, Robert. Literature Resource Center "Sidelights" 16th April,2007

< http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=rock89639&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13033641&n=10&docNum=H1000034439&ST=Robert+Frost&bConts=278191 >

3: Frost, Robert. Figurative Language 24th April, 2007.

<http://www.Frostfriends.org/figurative.html>

Cited: 1: Frost, Robert. Literature Resource Center "Sidelights" 16th April, 2007.< http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=rock89639&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=2&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13033641&n=10&docNum=H1100190000&ST=Robert+Frost&bConts=278191 > 2: Frost, Robert. Literature Resource Center "Sidelights" 16th April,2007 < http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=rock89639&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13033641&n=10&docNum=H1000034439&ST=Robert+Frost&bConts=278191 > 3: Frost, Robert. Figurative Language 24th April, 2007. <http://www.Frostfriends.org/figurative.html>