Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the poet, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.
When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, National Poetry Month.
Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Robert Frost — Related Poets. Lisel Mueller. He said:. These two fears were ever present in Robert Frost, with the result that his published verses were of the highest order and completely understood by thousands of Americans in whom they struck a ready response.
To countless persons who had never seen New Hampshire birches in the snow or caressed a perfect ax he exemplified a great American tradition with his superb, almost angular verses written out of the New England scene. Not since Whittier in "Snowbound" had captured the penetrating chill of New England's brief December day had any American poet more exactly caught the atmosphere north of Boston or the thin philosophy of its fence-mending inhabitants.
His pictures of an abandoned cord of wood warming "the frozen swamp as best it could, with the slow smokeless burning of decay" or of how "two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference," with their Yankee economy of words, moved his readers nostalgically and filled the back pastures of their mind with memories of a shrewd and quiet way of life.
Strangely enough, Frost spent 20 years writing his verses on stone walls and brown earth, blue butterflies and tall, slim trees without winning any recognition in America. When he sent them to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note:. After that the way was not so hard, and in the years that followed he was to win the Pulitzer Prize four times, be honored by many institutions of higher learning and find it possible for a poet, who would write of things that were "common in experience, uncommon in writing," to earn enough money so that he would not have to teach or farm or make shoes or write for newspapers -- all things he had done in his early days.
Raymond Holden, poet and critic, pointed out in a "profile" in The New Yorker magazine that there was more than the ordinary amount of paradox in the personality and career of Frost. Essentially a New England poet in a day when there were few poets in that region, he was born in San Francisco; fundamentally a Yankee, he was the son of an ardent Democrat whose belief in the Confederacy led him to name his son Robert Lee; a farmer in New Hampshire, he preferred to sit on a fence and watch others work; a teacher, he despised the rigors of the educational process as practiced in the institutions where he taught.
Like many another Yankee individualists, Robert Frost was a rebel. So was his father, William Frost, who had run away from Amherst, Mass. His mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, emigrated to Philadelphia when she was a girl. His father died when Robert, who was born March 26, , was about The boy and his mother, the former Isabelle Moody, went to live at Lawrence, Mass.
Influenced by the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert wanted to be a poet before he went to Dartmouth college where he stayed only through the year In the next several years he worked as a bobbin boy in the Lawrence mills, was a shoemaker and for a short while a reporter for The Lawrence Sentinel. He attended Harvard in , then became a farmer at Derry, N.
In he married Elinor White, also a teacher, by whom he had five children. In Mr. Frost sold the farm and the family went to England. He came home to find the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asking for poems. He sent along the very ones that had previously been rejected, and they were published.
The Frosts went to Franconia, N. His poetry brought him some money, and in he again became a teacher. He was a professor of English, then "poet in residence" for more than 20 years at Amherst College and he spent two years in a similar capacity at the University of Michigan.
In he retired temporarily as a teacher. Frost died that year in Florida. Afterward, he taught intermittently at Harvard, Amherst and Dartmouth. In Frost, who had then been a poet or 20 years, was made a member of the national Institute of Arts and Letters; in , of the American Academy. When his "Corrected Poems" were published in , he again won that prize. Frost won many honorary degrees, from master of arts at Amherst in to doctor of humane letters at the University of Vermont in , and others followed from Harvard, Yale and other institutions.
The issuing in of "The Complete Poems of Robert Frost," a page volume, was the signal for another series of broad critical appraisals studded with phrased like "lasting significance.
In Washington the Senate adopted a resolution to send him greetings on his 75th birthday. On that occasion he said that 20 acres of land for every man "would be the answer to all the world's problems" noting that life on the farm would show men "their burdens as well as their privileges.
His lectures at Harvard, where he was Charles Eliot Norton lecturer in and , and elsewhere, were less about poetry and more about the moral values of life. But it was less to these than to his earlier works that readers turned for satisfaction; to such lines as these on the "Hired Man":. Nothing to look backward to with pride Nothing to look forward to with hope While critics heaped belated praise on his earthy, Yankee, birchbark-clear poems, there were also finely fashioned lyrics in which the man of the soil flashed fire with intellect.
When the college took over the house museum in , it considered how it could honor Frost and the space while also making them relevant to students and the community. After a life seen as the genial farmer-poet persona that he created, Frost died at age 88 in His reputation changed when his friend, Lawrance Thompson, released his three-volume biography , in which Frost comes across as an angry megalomaniac.
There have been biographies since which try to overcorrect the darker Thompson portrait, and these can sometimes seem more the canonizations of a saint than of a writer. The truth is somewhere in between. Frost, like all of us, was a tangled mess of many selves, inconsistent and imperfect. Now, I find I actually crave the flaws of human handiwork.
I gloat over imperfection. Frost was connected to the founding of Bennington and the area, so it feels a part of his legacy to continue that tradition by keeping the space contemporary. Although it has owned the property for less than a year, the college has already hosted classes, concerts and art exhibits while keeping the place grounded in the poet and his poetry. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again.
Perhaps an even more surprising thing to discover while standing in this room is that Frost wrote that classic winter rhyme on a hot summer morning, not unlike today. It becomes clear in these rooms that there is so much more to Frost than the image of a simple farmer espousing country wisdom in artisanal verse. The pastoral moralism that he was often accused of peddling was actually a clever sleight of hand.
They ascend the heights of universality through their local dwelling, much like the stories of Sherwood Anderson or the novels of William Faulkner. Instead, we should remember them as men with a radical openness towards the world. Letting various positions wrestle with one another, wading into that uncertainty, mystery, doubt, was the true aim of a poem, of a poet, of a person. On the trail of Robert Frost in New England, somewhere among the lush, green forests and between the walls of these houses — houses which will at some point crumble, no matter the historical importance and national landmark designation — I found what I already knew, what was there between the lines of the poetry: the deceptively simple poetics of soil and stone; the rhythms of babbling brooks and murmuring breezes; and, most important, the dark, deep wooded ambiguity of the world laid bare.
I hold it in my hands for a moment, savoring the contours of the not-quite-spherical stone, like one savors a line of poetry, letting it linger on the tongue.
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