Robert frost poetry biography of donald

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Frost's poetry has a very modern effect, and his best poems owe as much to the twentieth-century New England in which he lived and wrote as they do to the centuries of metrical poets he revered in his obedience to forms.

Legacy

In twentieth-century literature, Robert Frost occupied an unusual position, combining parts of the modernist temperament with traditional poetry forms.

While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), thereby establishing his reputation.

A collection of fine scholarly essays on Frost by critics like William Pritchard and Donald Sheehy. Half biography, half critique, this elegant study remains one of the finest introductions to Frost’s life and work.

GUIDES/GENERAL READING

• The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, edited by Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizareta.

  His mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.

  Frost was a descendant of Samuel Appleton, one of the early settlers of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Rev. George Phillips, one of the early settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts.

  Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with The San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector.

  His epitaph quotes the last line from his poem, "The Lesson for Today" (1942): "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

  One of the original collections of Frost materials, to which he himself contributed, is found in the Special Collections department of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts.

  This unusual but invaluable book reproduces Frost’s first four collections and a selection of well-known later poems, supplementing every poem with a critical gloss by Kendall.

• Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing by Richard Poirier. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock poets and Frost's inspiration for "The Road Not Taken"), T.

  E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938. He was a professor of English at Amherst College from 1916 to 1938, where he pushed his writing students to use the human voice in their work.

  He spoke his poem "The Gift Outright" at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 and went on to represent the United States on other official missions.

  The more recent Robert Frost in Context, edited by Mark Richardson and also published by Cambridge University Press, supplements scholarly essays with criticism from poets like Paul Muldoon, as well as the perspective of Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis.

Want more Robert Frost? He would win additional Pulitzers for Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937, and A Witness Tree in 1943.

For forty-two years – from 1921 to 1962 – Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, at its mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont.

Frost defined the sentence sound as the tonal sound of a sentence that was distinct from the sound or meaning of its words. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (A Boy's Will) and 1914 (North of Boston).

In 1915, during World War I, Frost returned to America, where Holt's American edition of A Boy's Will had recently been published, and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing.

When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. Readers up for a challenge may supplement Poirier’s book with Mark Richardson’s The Ordeal of Robert Frost, which is more overtly academic but also one of the most intelligent and sympathetic studies of the poet.

The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen.

He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Take these words from his renowned poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as an example:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The final sentence's weary, the sing-song tone is reinforced by the repetition of the last line.

There are entries on all the individual poems, the Frost biographical controversies, the Derry farm and almost everything else having to do with the poet.

Robert Frost Among His Poems by Jeffrey Cramer. He did not enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry.

Adult years

In 1894, he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly.

An extraordinary resource that ranges across the entire Frost enterprise.