Life and Work of Robert Frost - Essay Example

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent. In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book-including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)-his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January 29, 1963, in Boston. To characterize Robert Frost's poetry is to speak of his mastery of not one voice by many voices, and that is most apparent when he is heard reading his poems aloud. He portrays men and women of rural New England and differentiates among them, giving them real feelings and real utterances. A rare and wonderful recording, the first cassette contains "The Road Not Taken", "Birches", "Mending Wall", "Death of a Hired Man", and many more, recorded in May 1956 at Frost's home in Cambridge, where ebullient spirits, rural quiet and a feeling that this was to be the definitive Frost recording influence the fine vitality of this reading. Frost's diversity is also evident on the second of two cassettes in this collection, which includes Frost's readings at The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in 1950, 1951, and 1952, including "Fire and Ice", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and dozens more. An Analysis of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" Mending Wall, by Robert Frost portrays the routines of two neighbors who are constantly mending the fence, or wall, that separates their properties. If a stone is missing form the fence, you can bet that the two men are out there putting it back together piece by piece. Frost's description of every detail in this poem is quite interesting, very pleasant to read, and extremely imaginable. He leaves the reader to decide for himself what deductions he is to make from the reading. On one hand, Frost makes literal implications about what the two men are doing. For instance, they are physically putting the stones back, one by one. Their dedication, commitment, and constant drive shines through when reading how persistence these men seem about keeping the wall intact. Quite the contrary however, is the inferences that something even deeper is going on. There is a sharing experience taking place here. Indeed, by laboring so hard, each man is experiencing physical repercussions, but they are also using this time as a "meet and greet" period. We can gather from the beginning of the poem that the wall has many forces that keep's it in shambles. For instance, Frost writes; "...that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun...", and "I have come after them(hunters) and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone..." The man and his neighbor don't seem to have time for anything else, for it sounds as if they are constantly making repairs. Is there a reason for this It is important to note that not only are these men completing a manly task, but they are also "building" some type of relationship. If this were not an issue, the neighbor would not repeat; As the man tells his story, we find that even though the two men may be conversing and interacting, there is some distance between them at all times. The man says; "...on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again." It seems to show that even though there is a need for friendship in each of us, it is equally as necessary for us to have our own space. As the poem continues we see that what is taking place is almost like a game. In fact, he says; "Oh, just another kind of outdoor game." And the narrator continues by saying, "We keep the wall between us as we go". This is almost like there is this game of leapfrog taking place! "He is all pine and I am apple orchard," This seems to indicate that each of us are different. Having different likes, dislikes, etc. One of the men farms "apples", while the other just has "pines". Nonetheless, each are special and both of them contain separate, yet endearing qualities. Now let's reflect on Frost's use of the "stone" itself. What could he have meant by this poem He is speaking to the stones. In other words he is telling them that if they are going to fall, please wait until he is not looking. This seems to be an odd touch to this poem. It almost appears that the man is so bored at times that he would talk about or to anything. Maybe the neighbor is not as much of a talker as one might have imagined. Maybe the man only has himself and these inanimate objects to converse with. After all, the only quote by the neighbor in this poem is; "Good fences make good neighbors." In another light however, there is the idea of separation, or segregation. I have briefly touched on the idea that the two men are consistently kept apart by this wall. In addition though, the author contrasts his "wall" of separation with the idea of segregation in our world. We are left with the impression that if two people have differences, no matter the extent, they are not considered equals by society. Finally, there is the recurring idea that the wall should not be there in the first place. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." This sentence infers that the wall separating we as a people, needs to come down. It is virtually impossible for us to build lasting relationships while we are still possessed with hatred and discrimination. "The Road Not Taken," perhaps the most famous example of Frost's own claims to conscious irony and "the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." Thompson documents the ironic impulse that produced the poem as Frost's "gently teasing" response to his good friend, Edward Thomas, who would in their walks together take Frost down one path and then regret not having taken a better direction. According to Thompson, Frost assumes the mask of his friend, taking his voice and his posture, including the un-Frostian sounding line, "I shall be telling this with a sigh," to poke fun at Thomas's vacillations; Frost ever after, according to Thompson, tried to bring audiences to the ironic point, warning one group, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem - very tricky" (Letters xiv-xv). Thompson's critical evaluation is simply that Frost had, in that particular poem, "carried himself and his ironies too subtly," so that the poem is, in effect, a failure (Letters xv). Yet is it simply that - a too exact parody of a mediocre poetic voice, which becomes among the sentimental masses, ironically, one of the most popularly beloved of Frost's "wise" poems This is the easiest way to come to terms critically with the popularity of "The Road Not Taken" but it is not, perhaps, the only or best way: in this critical case, the road less traveled may indeed be more productive. For Frost by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas. He wrote his only elegy to Thomas and he gives him, in that poem, the highest praise of all from one who would, himself, hope to be a "good Greek": he elegizes Thomas as "First soldier, and then poet, and then both, / Who died a soldier-poet of your race." He recalls Thomas to Amy Lowell, saying "the closest I ever came in friendship to anyone in England or anywhere else in the world I think was with Edward Thomas" (Letters 220). Frost's protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than "anyone in England or anywhere else in the world" (Letters 220). It might be argued that in becoming Thomas in "The Road Not Taken," Frost momentarily loses his defensive preoccupation with disguising lyric involvement to the extent that ironic weapons fail him. A rare instance in Frost's poetry in which there is a loved and reciprocal figure, the poem is divested of the need to keep the intended reader at bay. Here Frost is not writing about that contentiously erotic love which is predicated on the sexual battles between a man and a woman, but about a higher love, by the terms of the good Greek, between two men. As Plato says in the Symposium (181, b-c), "But the heavenly love springs from a goddess [Aphrodite] whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male, and who is also the elder of the two, and innocent of any hint of lewdness. And so those who are inspired by this other Love turn rather to the male, preferring the more vigorous and intellectual bent." If the poem is indeed informed by such love, it becomes the most consummate irony of all, as it shows, despite one level of Frost's intentions, how fraternal love can transmute swords to plowshares, how, indeed, two roads can look about the same, be traveled about the same, and be utterly transformed by the traveler. Frost sent this poem as a letter, as a communication in the most basic sense, to a man to whom he says, in "To E. T.," "I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain / Unsaid between us, brother . . . " When nothing is meant to remain unsaid, and when the poet's best hope is to see his friend "pleased once more with words of mine," all simple ironies are made complex. "The Road Not Taken," far from being merely a failure of ironic intent, may be seen as a touchstone for the complexities of analyzing Frost's ironic voices. References: Panda, Tuesday, December 16, 2008, data available at http://www.echeat.com/essay.phpt=26083 Gerber, Philip L , 1967, " Robert Frost", Twayne Publishers, New York. Top of Form Read More