Life and Works of Robert Frost
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Robert Lee Frost (Mar 26, 1874 – Jan 29, 1963)
Robert Lee Frost
was born on March 26th, 1874 in San Francisco, California, USA.Frost was
born to William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. Frost’s father, a
journalist, diedof tuberculosis when Frost was 11. After his father’s death in
1885, with his mother and sister he moved from San Francisco to Lawrence,
Massachusetts.He married Elinor Miriam White in 1895. They had 6 children, but
4 of them died, only two outlived him.
He graduated from
the Lawrence High School in the year 1892, alongside his future wife, Elinor
White. He attended two Ivy League
institutions (Dartmouth College and Harvard
University), he
never earned a college degree.Although he never graduated from college, Frost
received over 40 honorary degrees, including from Princeton, Oxford and
Cambridge universities
He managed to
sell his first poem in the year 1894, My Butterfly: An Elegy which
appeared in the New York Independent in November 8, 1894 edition. He earned
fifteen dollars from the sale.Robert Frost lived and wrote famous poems on a
farm in Derry, New Hampshire (Known as the Robert Frost Farm), from 1900 to
1911. Before gaining fame as a poet, Robert Frost worked as a:Farmer (Derry,
New Hampshire), Teacher (English at Pinkerton Academy, New Hampshire Normal
School, and his mother's school), Editor (of the Lawrence Sentinel), Factory
Worker, Newspaper Deliveryman, and Cobbler.
In 1912, Frost
moved with his family to England. He published his first two volumes in London
in 1913 (A Boy's Will) and 1914 (North of Boston),and gained recognition.In
England, Robert Frost made important contacts including T. E. Hulme, Edward
Thomas, and Ezra Pound. They were the first Americans to write a favorite
review on Robert Frost’s work.
Considered one of
the most celebrated poets in America, He was an author of searching and often
dark meditations on universal themes. His work was highly associated to rural
life in New England. The poet often uses the New England setting to explore
intricate philosophical and social themes.
Frost bought a
small farm at Franconia, New Hampshire, (New England, USA) in 1915. In 1915,
Frost launched a career in writing, lecturing and teaching. From 1916-1938 he
became an English professor at Amherst College. While a professor at Amherst
College, he advised his writing students to always bring the notion of the
human voices to their craft. He became popular for poems involving interplay of
voices such as Death of the Hired Man or dramas. Frost co-founded ‘Bread
Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1926, is often called the oldest and most
prestigious conference of its kind in the United States.
Robert Frost is
considered one of America’s greatest and most beloved poets.He is the only poet
to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for
poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943). He
was appointed United States Poet
Laureate in 1958, he also received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960,
and in 1961 was named poet laureate of
Vermont.Robert Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31
times, but he never won.
Randall Jarrell
wrote: "Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot, seems to
me the greatest of the American poets of this century.”He was invited by President John F.
Kennedy to recite his patriotic poem ‘the
Gift Outright’. (First poet to ever recite a poem at a
U.S. Presidential Inauguration.)
He described
himself as synecdochist:“If I must be classified as a poet, I might be called a
Synecdochist”. He compared the synecdoche
to“skirting the hem of the
goddess.”
Frost
famously called himself as humanist, instead of nature poet: “I guess I’m not a Nature poet. I have only written two
poems without a human being in them.”
Frost’s work was
highly popular and it remained so. Among Frost popular shorter poems are “Mending
Wall”, “Directive”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “The Road Not
Taken”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, “Fire and Ice”, “After Apple Picking”.
Robert Frost died
on January 29, 1963, at age 88 in Boston, Massachusetts, due to complications
from prostate surgery.
Major Works:
1. A Boy's Will (1913) – first
collection of poems.
2. North of Boston (1914) – second collection of
poems- dedicated to his
wife Elinor Frost.It is subtitled “This Book of People.”Amy Lowell
called it a “sad” book, referring to its portraits of rural New Englanders.
a. Mending Wall: famous line “good fences make good
neighbors”
b. After Apple-Picking 1914-The
speaker is physically and spiritually exhausted after a day of apple picking
c. Home Burial 1914-a wife and
husband's grief over losing their child.
d.
The Death
of the Hired Man 1914- narrates a conversation between a
farmer (Warren) and his wife (Mary) about an old farmhand (Silas) who left the
farm.
3. Mountain Interval (1916) – 3rd
collection
a. The Road Not Taken 1915: first
published in the August 1915 issue of the magazine The Atlantic Monthly.
opening lines:
Two
roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And
sorry I could not travel both”
closing lines:
Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I
took the one less traveled by,
And
that has made all the difference.”
b. Birches 1915: draws on his
childhood memories of swinging on birch trees as a boy. famous line: “Earth is the right place for
love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
c. Out, Out—title is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. story of a young boy who dies
after his hand is severed by a "buzz-saw".
4.
New Hampshire (1923)- collection
of poems, Won the first Pulitzer Prize in 1924
a. Fire and Ice- first published in published in 1920in
Harper's Magazine- debates whether fire (desire) or ice (hatred) will end the
world. “Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.”
b. Nothing Gold Can Stay- short poem
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her
early leaf’s a flower;
But
only so an hour.
c. Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening: famous
lines:
“The woods are lovely, dark and
deep,
But
I have promises to keep,
And
miles to go before I sleep,
And
miles to go before I sleep.
These lines
were dear to Jawahar Lal Nehru
5.
West-Running Brook (1928)- collection
6.
Collected
Poems (1930)- consisted of
Robert Frost's first five poetry books, Pulitzer Prize in 1931
7.
A
Further Range (1936) – Pulitzer Prize in 1937
a. Desert Places- darker and somber poem
8.
A
Witness Tree (1942) – Fourth and
his last Pulitzer Prize
in 1943
9.
Come
In, and Other Poems (1943)
10.
Steeple
Bush (1947)
11.
In
the Clearing (1962) – His last
collection
Essays:
1. The Figure a Poem Makes- 1939 essay, acting as a preface to his Collected Poems. –He famously stated that a poem provides a "momentary stay against confusion."He said, “A poem begins in delight and
ends in wisdom.”
Play:
1. A Masque of Reason (1945)-
comedy play in the form of the43rd chapter of to the Book of Job.(which only
has 42 chapters)
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