Transcript The Poetry of Robert Frost - North Bergen School District

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 WoodPile."
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 selfrecrimination 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 crackerbarrel 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, threevolume official biography (1966-1976) Frost
was presented as a misanthrope, antiintellectual, 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/b
ookbind/pubbooks/kennedy2_awl/cha
pter10/objectives/deluxe-content.html