The Poetry of

Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
• Robert Frost was the most popular
American poet of the twentieth century.
• Most Americans recognize his name, the
titles of and lines from his best-known
poems, and even his face and the sound of
his voice.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
• Given his immense popularity, it is a
remarkable testimony to the range and depth
of his achievement that he is also considered,
by those qualified to judge, to be one of the
greatest, if not the very greatest, of modern
American poets.
• Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four
times
Early Life
• Robert Frost was born in San Francisco,
California on March 26, 1874.
• His father, a journalist and local
politician, died when Frost was eleven
years old. His Scottish mother resumed
her career as a schoolteacher to support
her family.
Early Life
• The family lived in Lawrence,
Massachusetts, with Frost's paternal
grandfather.
• In 1892 Frost graduated from a high
school and attended Dartmouth College
for a few months.
• Over the next ten years he held a number
of jobs
Marriage and Family
• In 1894 the New York Independent published
Frost's poem "My Butterfly" and he had five
poems privately printed.
• Frost worked as a teacher and continued to write
and publish his poems in magazines.
• From 1897 to 1899 Frost studied at Harvard, but
left without receiving a degree.
Dark Years
• In 1895 he married a former schoolmate,
and co-valedictorian, Elinor White; they
had six children.
• He married Elinor on December 19, and
Elliott, their first child, was born on
September 29, 1896.
• Elliott's death, from cholera, in July of
1900, was the first of many family
tragedies that Frost would endure.
Dark Years
• Between 1899 and 1907, Elinor and
Robert had five more children--another
son, Carol, and four daughters, the last of
whom lived for only three days.
• Frost's mother also died in 1900, of
cancer.
Dark Years
• The following year saw the death of his
grandfather, William Prescott Frost, Sr.,
who left his grandson a yearly annuity of
$500.00 (a substantial amount at the time)
and the use of his farm in Derry, New
Hampshire, for a period of ten years, after
which Robert would become its owner.
A Risky Move
• Despite his popular image as a farmer-
poet, those ten years were the only period
of Frost's life in which he worked
seriously at farming, and in the last five of
them he also found it financially
necessary to teach school.
A Risky Move
• He sold the farm in 1911 when it became
his, and with the proceeds he moved his
family to England in August 1912, hoping
to find there the literary success that had
eluded him in his own country.
Success Abroad
• There he published his first collection of poems,
A Boy's Will(1913) followed by North of Boston
(1914), which gained international reputation.
• Frost met numerous literary figures, including
Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and William
Butler Yeats (who tells Pound that A Boy's Will
is "the best poetry written in America for a long
time").
Success Abroad
• The collection contains some of Frost's
best-known poems: "Mending Wall,"
"The Death of the Hired Man," "Home
Burial," "After Apple-Picking," and "The
Wood-Pile."
The New American Genius
• After returning to the US in 1915 with his
family, Frost bought a farm near
Franconia, New Hampshire.
• There, his wife Elinor suffered a
miscarriage.
• 1916: Frost began teaching at Amhert
College
The New American Genius
• 1924 - Awarded Pulitzer Prize for New
Hampshire in May.
• Receives Honorary Litt.D. degrees from
Middlebury College and Yale University.
• Gives notice to Amherst of his acceptance
of lifetime appointment at University of
Michigan as Fellow in Letters.
The New American Genius
• Frost's images - woods, stars, houses,
brooks, - are usually taken from
everyday life.
• With his down-to-earth approach to his
subjects, readers found it easy to follow
the poet into deeper truths, without
being burdened with pedantry.
Tragedy and Depression
• Behind the largely unruffled public facade
was a personal life of great stress and
sorrow.
• His daughters Lesley and Irma underwent
unhappy marriages and painful divorces;
Irma was at one point committed to a
mental hospital, as Frost's sister had been
some years earlier.
Tragedy and Depression
• 1925: Daughter Marjorie is hospitalized in
December suffering from pneumonia, a peri-
cardiac infection, chronic appendicitis and
nervous exhaustion.
• Marjorie, in many ways the favorite of both her
parents, died shortly after the birth of her first
child in 1934, a loss from which neither Frost
nor his wife ever fully recovered.
Tragedy and Depression
• In March 1938, after a long and often
difficult marriage, Elinor herself died of
heart disease.
• In October 1940, Frost's son Carol,
feeling himself a failure despite Frost's
strenuous efforts to convince him
otherwise, committed suicide.
Tragedy and Depression
• His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his
children.
• Two of his daughters suffered mental
breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet
and farmer, committed suicide.
• Frost also suffered from depression and the
continual self-doubt led him to cling to the
desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature.
A Poet Who Terrifies
• None of these traumatic experiences
found their way directly into Frost's
poetry.
• At a far remove from the confessional
tendencies of many later American poets,
he did not see his art as a form of therapy.
A Poet Who Terrifies
• But these experiences, and the sense of
helplessness and self-recrimination that
many of them bred, inevitably worked to
shape and color the views of life's
possibilities and its limits that inform his
work.
The Darker Side
• To the broad public, Frost may be a painter
of charming postcard scenes and a front-
porch philosopher dispensing consolation and
cracker-barrel wisdom, but behind these
stereotypes there is in Frost's work a tragic
and (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) a terrifying
poet, whose deepest note is one of inevitable
human isolation.
The Darker Side
• In a life more painful than most, Frost
struggled heroically with his inner and
outer demons, and out of that struggle he
produced what many consider to be the
single greatest body of work by any
American poet of the twentieth century.
A Venerated Poet
• The capstone of his public career was his
appearance at John F. Kennedy's
Presidential inauguration in January 1961.
• When the sun and the wind prevented him
from reading his new poem, 'The Preface',
Frost recited his old poem, 'The Gift
Outright', from memory.
A Venerated Poet
• Over the years he received a remarkable number of
literary and academic honors.
• Among the honors and rewards Frost received were
tributes from the U.S. Senate (1950), the American
Academy of Poets (1953), New York University (1956),
and the Huntington Hartford Foundation (1958), the
Congressional Gold Medal (1962), the Edward
MacDowell Medal (1962).
• In 1930 he was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, Amherst College appointed him
Simpson Lecturer for Life (1949), and in 1958 he was
made poetry consultant for the Library of Congress.
A Venerated Poet
• Kennedy also sent him to the Soviet
Union as a sort of cultural envoy in 1962,
not long before Frost's death in a Boston
hospital on January 29, 1963, eight weeks
short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
• At the time of his death, Frost was
regarded as a kind of unofficial poet
laureate of the United States
Frost’s Legacy
• "I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover's quarrel with the world,"
Frost once said.
• His independent, elusive, half humorous
view of the world produced such remarks
as "I never take my side in a quarrel", or
"I'm never serious except when I'm
fooling."
Frost’s Legacy
• Later biographers have created a complex
and contradictory portrait of the poet.
Frost’s Legacy
• In Lawrance Thompson's humorless, three-volume
official biography (1966-1976) Frost was presented as a
misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but
in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with
sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet
of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who
sought to fit in.
• Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt
alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into
reveries.
Frost’s Legacy
• While preferring to stay at home, he
traveled more than any poet of his
generation to give lectures and readings,
even though he remained terrified of
public speaking to the end
Not a Nature Poet
• Frost has often been referred to as a
“nature” poet because so many of his
poems are set in rural or pastoral
surroundings
• Frost said that he had only written one
poem without a man in it
• Nature, for Frost, was an arena for action
Aspects of Frost's poetry:
• using contraries and
contradictions
• using common, everyday
speech
• poems set in nature
• deep meanings exist
beneath a simple exterior
A Modern Poet
• uses ordinary speech within formal patterns of
line and stanza
• uses traditional forms and structures while
exploring modern themes of alienation and
isolation
• Frost believed that the poet's response to
modern life was to revert back to traditional
forms which provided a sense of order
Motifs in Frost's Poetry:

• the cycle of the

seasons
• the alternation of
night and day
• natural
phenomenon
• rural images
A Poet Who Terrifies
• The literary critic Lionel Trilling called
Frost “a poet who terrifies.”
• Often in Frost’s poems, there exists a
subtle undertone of fear or uneasiness – a
“hinting” at something dark or dangerous
A Poet Who Terrifies
• This juxtaposition of the calm, often
rural, peaceful surface with an
underlying darkness is not uncommon in
Frost’s poetry
• He uses these “contraries” or “opposites”
often in his poetry
Frost Quotations
• “A poem begins in delight and ends in
wisdom.”
• “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a
sense of wrong, a homesickness, a
lovesickness.”
• “No tears in the writer, no tears in the
reader.”
Frost Quotations
• “The best way out is always through.”

• “One of the hardest things to accept as just is a

called third strike.” Perfect Day -- a Day of
Prowess

• “…some baseball is the fate of us all. For my

part, I am never more at home in America than
at a baseball game…”
Sources
• http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pu
bbooks/kennedy2_awl/chapter10/objectives/del
uxe-content.html