Robert Frost Essay, Research Paper

On March 26, 1874, a legend in poetry was born. That legend was one of the most gifted twentieth century poets the world had ever seen and he was awarded with four Pulitzer Prizes. The legend was Robert Frost, and his legacy lives on even today. Frost s poems had deep philosophical meaning that could be understood by people in every walk of life. Even though his verse forms were traditional, he was among the pioneers in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary of everyday speech. Because of this, Frost s poetry was both traditional and experimental.

Frost s father died in 1885, when Frost was at the young age of 11. After his father s death, his family moved from the west in California, to the east in Massachusetts. After attending Lawrence High School in that state, Frost entered Dartmouth College, but he only attended the school for one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, Frost taught school classes and worked two jobs: one as a mill worker, and the other as a newspaper reporter. In 1894, he sold his first poem My Butterfly: An Elegy to a New York literary journal called The Independent. A year after selling that poem, he married Elinor White, who had shared valedictorian honours with Frost after high school. Two years after marrying, Frost attended Harvard College for two years till 1899 as a special student, but again, he left without a degree. Over the next ten years, he lived in and operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, writing poems but rarely ever publishing them. During this time span, he supported himself and his wife by teaching at Derry s Pinkerton Academy.

As Frost continued to write at his farm, he decided he needed to entirely devote himself to writing, so in 1912, when Frost was 38, he sold his farm, and moved his family to England. In England, Frost s poems were instant successes. He established himself and his way of writing very quickly. A Boy s Will was accepted by a London publisher and was made public in 1913. By the year after, Frost had another poem published, North of Boston . Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in the American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frost s main American publisher, and in establishing Frost s transatlantic success and reputation.

Part on Frost s success in England has to be credited to the several already prominent literary figures he called on soon after arriving. One of these was Ezra Pound, who wrote the very first American review of Frost s verse for Harriet Munroe s Poetry magazine (Although Frost disliked Pound, he was later instrumental in helping Pound be released from a long confinement in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital.). Despite growing up in America, Frost was more impressed and lastingly influenced by the Georgian poets Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, and T.E. Hulme, whose rural subjects and style were more to his own liking and style. During the time when he lived near the Georgians in Gloucestershire, Frost became a very good friend with a brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas, who he pleaded to turn from prose to poetry. Thomas did, dedicating his first and sadly his last volume of verse to Frost before he died serving in World War I.

In 1915, Frost decided to move his family back to the United States. He arrived in New York City two days after the U.S. publication of North of Boston his first book in the States. Sales of his work, including A Boy s Will and North of Boston allowed Frost to purchase another farm in Franconia, N.H. It was here that Frost began to place new poems in literary periodicals and publish his third book, Mountain Interval (1916); and to begin on a long career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. In 1924, he received his first Pulitzer Prize in poetry for New Hampshire in 1923. He was also given the prestigious award for Collected Poems in 1930, A Further Range in 1936, and A Witness Tree in 1942. Over his career, Frost received an unprecedented number of literary, academic, and public honours.

Frost s importance to the poetry world is taken from the power and memorability or certain poems of his. “The Death of the Hired Man” (from North of Boston) combines lyric and dramatic poetry in blank verse. “After Apple-Picking” (from the same volume) is a free-verse dream poem with philosophical undertones. “Mending Wall” (also published in North of Boston) demonstrates Frost’s simultaneous command of lyrical verse, dramatic conversation, and ironic commentary. “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches” (from Mountain Interval) and the famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (from New Hampshire) exemplify Frost’s ability to join the pastoral and philosophical modes in lyrics of unforgettable beauty. Frost’s poetic and political conservatism caused him to lose favor with some of his literary critics, but his reputation as a major poet is secure forever. He unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life’s ambition: to write “a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.”