Robert Frost Biography

Educator, Poet (18741963)

A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, American Robert Frost
depicted realistic New England life through language and situations
familiar to the common man.

QUICK FACTS
NAME
Robert Frost
OCCUPATION
Educator, Po
et
BIRTH DATE
March
26, 1874
DEATH DATE
January
29, 1963
EDUCATION
Harvard University, Lawrence High School, Dartmouth College
PLACE OF BIRTH
San Francisco, California
PLACE OF DEATH
Boston, Massachusetts
FULL NAME
Robert Frost

QUOTES
The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true
reader.
Robert Frost

Synopsis
Born on March 26, 1874, Robert Frost spent his first 40 years as an
unknown. He exploded on the scene after returning from England at
the beginning of WWI. Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and a special guest
at President John F. Kennedys inauguration, Frost became a poetic
force and the unofficial "poet laureate" of the United States. He died of
complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963.

Early Years
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California.
He spent the first 11 years of his life there, until his journalist father,
William Prescott Frost Jr., died of tuberculosis. Following his father's
passing, Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of
Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and
Frost attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future love and
wife, Elinor White, who was his co-valedictorian when they graduated
in 1892.
After high school, Frost attended Dartmouth College for several
months, returning home to work a slew of unfulfilling jobs. In 1894, he
had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," published in The
Independent, a weekly literary journal based in New York City. With this
success, Frost proposed to Elinor, who was attending St. Lawrence
University, but she turned him down because she first wanted to finish
school. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he
returned, he proposed again. By then, Elinor had graduated from
college, and she accepted. They married on December 19, 1895, and
had their first child, Elliot, in 1896.
Beginning in 1897, Frost attended Harvard University but had to drop
out after two years due to health concerns. He returned to Lawrence to
join his wife, who was now pregnant with their second child, Lesley. In
1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New
Hampshireproperty that Frost's grandfather had purchased for them
and they attempted to make a life on it for the next 12 years.
Though it was a fruitful time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period
in his personal life.
After their firstborn, Elliot, died of cholera in 1900, Elinor gave birth to
four more children: son Carol (1902), who would commit suicide in
1940; Irma (1903), who later developed mental illness; Marjorie
(1905), who died in her late 20s after giving birth; and Elinor (1907),
who died just weeks after she was born. Additionally, during that time,
Frost and Elinor attempted several endeavors, including poultry
farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful.
Despite such challenges, it was during this time that Frost acclimated
himself to rural life. In fact, he grew to depict it quite well, and began
setting many of his poems in the countryside. But while two of these,
"The Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence," would be published
in 1906, he could not find any publishers who were willing to
underwrite his other poems.

Public Recognition for Poetry

In 1912, Frost and Elinor decided to sell the farm in New Hampshire
and move the family to England, where they hoped there would be
more publishers willing to take a chance on new poets. Within just a
few months, Frost, now 38, found a publisher who would print his first
book of poems, A Boys Will, followed by North of Boston a year later. It

was at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward
Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways.
Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favorable
light, as well as provide significant encouragement. Frost credited
Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for
one of his most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken." Apparently,
Thomas's indecision and regret regarding what paths to take inspired
Frost's work. The time Frost spent in England was one of the most
significant periods in his life, but it was short-lived. Shortly after World
War I broke out in August 1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return
to America.
When Frost arrived back home, his reputation had preceded him, and
he was well-received by the literary world. His new publisher, Henry
Holt, who would remain with him for the rest of his life, had purchased
all of the copies ofNorth of Boston, and in 1916, he published
Frost's Mountain Interval, a collection of other works that he created
while in England, including a tribute to Thomas. Journals such as
the Atlantic Monthly, who had turned Frost down when he submitted
work earlier, now came calling. Frost famously sent the Atlantic the
same poems that they had rejected before his stay in England.
In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled down on a farm that they purchased in
Franconia, New Hampshire. There, Frost began a long career as a
teacher at several colleges, reciting poetry to eager crowds and writing
all the while. He taught at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan at
various times, but his most significant association was with Amherst
College, where he taught steadily during the period from 1916 to 1938,
and where the main library is now named in his honor. For a period of
more than 40 years beginning in 1921, Frost also spent almost every
summer and fall at Middlebury College, teaching English on its campus
in Ripton, Vermont.
During his lifetime, Frost would receive more than 40 honorary
degrees, and in 1924, he was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes,
for his book New Hampshire. He would subsequently win Pulitzers
for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness
Tree (1943).
Amidst these successes, Frost's family was dealt another tragic blow
when Elinor died in 1938. Diagnosed with cancer in 1937 and having
undergone surgery, she also had had a long history of heart trouble, to
which she ultimately succumbed. The same year as his wife's death,
Frost left his teaching position at Amherst College.

Literary Legacy
In the late 1950s, Frost, along with Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot,
championed the release of his old acquaintance Ezra Pound, who was
being held in a federal mental hospital for treason due to his
involvement with fascists in Italy during World War II. Pound was
released in 1958, after the indictments were dropped.

In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal. A year

later, at the age of 86, Frost was honored when asked to write and
recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. His sight
now failing, he was not able to see the words in the sunlight and
substituted the reading of one of his poems, "The Gift Outright," which
he had committed to memory.
In 1962, Frost visited the Soviet Union on a goodwill tour. However,
when he accidentally misrepresented a statement made by Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev following their meeting, he unwittingly
undid much of the good intended by his visit.
On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate
surgery. He was survived by two of his daughters, Lesley and Irma, and
his ashes are interred in a family plot in Bennington, Vermont.

Summary and Analysis of Mending Wall by Robert

Frost
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges -Isaac Newton
The poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost presents his ideas of barriers
between people, communication, friendship and the sense of safety that
people acquire from building barriers.
Lines 1-9: The narrator expresses his wonder about a phenomenon, through
these lines, that he has observed in nature. He says that he has observed
something mysterious takes place in nature which does not love the
existence of walls. That something makes the frozen ground to bloat under
the wall and topple the stone wall on the boundary of his property. Hence, a
gap is created in the wall through which two people can pass together.
Robert Frost says that sometimes even careless hunters damage the walls
but he drives them away and repairs the gap. The hunters pull down the
stones of the walls. This way they search for rabbits hiding under the wall to
please their barking dogs.
Lines 9-22: The poet rehearses the mystery of the wall. He says that no one
has seen or heard the noise when the gaps in the walls are made. But these
gaps are realities which are found during the spring when it is time for
mending walls. The narrator makes his neighbour go beyond the hill to see
the conditions there. One day, the narrator along with his neighbour decides
to walk along the wall which separates their properties. They find stones
fallen on the ground while they are walking. They pick up those stones from
their respective sides. Some stones are shaped in bread loaves or some are
shaped in round balls. Hence, the narrator and his neighbour are unable to
put those stones back in their position. The narrator feels they need to use

some kind of magic to put the stones back on the wall. During the process of
handling the stones, their fingers are chapped and they feel tired. But the
narrator and the neighbour look at it as an outdoor game, a kind of net
game, where the wall acts like a net and the narrator and his neighbour are
opponents.
Lines 22-36: The narrator tries to convince his neighbour that the wall is of
no need because the narrator has an apple orchard while the neighbour own
pine trees. He says that the apples that grow in his orchard would not
trespass and eat the cones of his pine trees. To this, the neighbour replies,
Good fences make good neighbours. The narrator is not sure whether he
can put an idea into the neighbours mind- the idea why good fences are
required to keep cows at bay. If there are no cows, fences are not needed
either. The narrator tells that if he has to ever build a wall, he will ask himself
whom he will be protecting by constructing a wall and whether the wall will
offend anyone. He believes that there is something that does not love walls
and wants it to be pulled down.
Lines 37-46:
The narrator tells his friend that he believes some non-human entity like
elves break the walls. The elves are tiny, supernatural beings from folklore
and myth. But then the narrator changes his opinion and feels that it may
not be the work of the elves but the power in nature which works against
building of walls and barriers. The narrator sees his neighbour holding firmly
a stone looking like an ancient stone-age man, armed to fight. The narrator
feels that his neighbour is living in the darkness of ignorance. His neigbour
does not want to go against his fathers words that good fences make good
neighbours. Thinking for a while, his neighbour reiterates that Good fences
make good neighbours.

Analysis: The theme of the poem is about two neighbours who disagree over
the need of a wall to separate their properties. Not only does the wall act as
a divider in separating the properties, but also acts as a barrier to friendship,
communication. From the narrators view, barriers lead to alienation and
emotional isolation and loneliness. The narrator cannot help but notice that
the natural world seems to dislike the existence of a wall as much as he does
and therefore, mysterious gaps appear from nowhere and boulders fall for
no reason. The poem portrays the lack of friendship between two
neighbours, they now each other but they are not friends. There exists a
communication gap between them; they meet each other only on appointed
days to fix the wall separating their properties.
Thus, the poem is a sad reflection on todays society, where man-made
barriers exist between men, groups, nations based on discrimination of race,
caste, creed, gender and religion.

Form and Structure:

Mending Wall is a poem of 46 lines without a neat stanza structure. It is a
dramatic narrative poem composed in blank verse and also comprises of
balanced strict Iambic pentameter lines.
The language of the poem is conversational in tone.
Poetical Devices:
Robert Frost has used a number of poetical devices to enhance the
perception and feelings that he wants to communicate to the readers
through an inanimate object, a wall.
Metaphor: Examples of metaphors in the poem are listed below;
1. The wall in the poem is a metaphor for two kinds of barriers- physical and
mental.
*Something there is that doesnt love a wall
*And set the wall between us once again
*We keep the wall between as we go.
2. In another metaphor, stone blocks have been compared to loaves and
balls.
*And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance.
Simile:
Example of simile from the poem,I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed..
In the above lines, Frost describes his neighbour who was holding a stone
firmly in his hand and looked like some primitive man armed to fight.
Personification:
Something there is that doesnt love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
In the above lines, an unseen force in nature has been personified. It is this
force that breaks down the boundaries that man has created.
Parallelism:
It is a figure of speech that has a similar word order and structure in their
syntax.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
Here, to each is parallelism as it emphasizes that fact that the narrator and
his neighbour are on the opposite sides of the wall.

Pun:
An example of Pun in the poem is And to whom I was like to offence. Here,
the word offence is a pun as it sounds like fence.
Paradox:
Frosts poems are famous for juxtaposing the opposites for life. The poem
has two famous lines which oppose each other.
Something there is that doesnt love a wall
Good fences make good neighbours.
Allusion:
Mending Wall has an allusion to elves, the tiny supernatural creatures
drawn from folklore and myth.
Alliteration:
The examples of alliteration in the poem are the following:
*We wear our fingers with handling them
*Before I built a wall
*What I was walling in or walling out.
Symbolism:
Frosts poems are known for his distinctive use of symbols. These symbols
enhance the significance and deeper meaning of the poem.
*The fence symbolizes national, racial, religious, political and economic
conflicts and discrimination which separate man from man and hinders the
ways of understanding and cultivating relationships.
*The dispute between the two neighbours symbolizes the clash between
tradition and modernity. The young generation wants to demolish the old
tradition and replace it with modernity while the old wants to cling on to the
existing tradition and beliefs.
In Mending Wall, Frost has taken an ordinary incident of constructing or
mending a wall between the his and his neighbours garden and has turned it
into a meditation on the division between human beings.
Go through the Solved Questions
What does the wall represent in the poem, Mending Wall?
Frosts poems are known for his extensive use of symbols and poetical
devices. Refer to the poem Mending Wall and justify the statement.