Robert Frost
When an artist becomes so popular that hoi polloi celebrate him and politicians reward him, critics and avant-gardes do their best to dismiss him. But Frost was that rarest of rare things: a poet who was very, very popular—superstar popular—and, at his best, very, very good. His popularity is unmatched in the annals of American poetry; by the end of his life he had achieved the iconic status of living legend. His collected poems exceeded record sales; he appeared on magazine covers, was asked by President Kennedy to compose an inaugural poem, was sent to Russia on a mission of goodwill by the U.S. government, was recognized on the street and in restaurants. He almost single-handedly created the poetry reading circuit, delighting the public all over the country with engaging presentations of his work. He was perhaps the first poet-in-residence at an American university, in which capacity his duty was little more than to live and exude poetry.
Frost is a poet who often seems liked for the wrong reasons—a poet who is read much but often not very carefully. The subtle wit of his language, his broad humor, and his frequent despair are too often overlooked for his regional-ness, his folksiness, and his public persona. The neglect of his true talents was compounded by the fact that serious criticism for so long did its best to ignore him. However, regardless of who reads him and for what reasons, what really matters are the poems; they stand alone by virtue of their own strength, independent of the associations surrounding them: Though perhaps influenced by, or in agreement with, statements by Imagists, Frost nonetheless belonged to no school; he worked outside of movements and manifestos to create his own sizeable niche in English literature. In the years covered by this SparkNote we find Frost reaching toward, and finally achieving, a mastery of his art.
Robert Frost is considered the quintessential New England poet, but he spent the first eleven years of his life in San Francisco. Only upon the death of Frost’s father did the family go to live with relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, Frost excelled in high school and fell in love with his co-valedictorian at Lawrence High, Elinor White. They became engaged; Elinor went off to college at St. Lawrence in upstate New York while Frost entered Dartmouth. He was not happy there, however, and left after one semester. Back home, Frost worked as a reporter on a local newspaper and taught school (in part, to help his mother, a teacher with poor control over her students). Frost and Elinor married in 1896, the same year their son Elliott was born. In 1897, Frost matriculated at Harvard University, where he excelled in the Classics. However, the financial and emotional pressures of having a wife, infant, and another child on the way, forced Frost to withdraw after three semesters.
The Frosts moved to a rented farm near Methuen, Massachusetts, and began raising poultry. Tragedy struck in 1900 when three-year-old Elliott died. The family bought a farm in Derry, not far from Lawrence, and Frost settled in to farm, read, write, and raise a family. Three more children were born healthy before the Frosts lost another child in infancy in 1907. In 1906, Frost began teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, where he proved an unconventional and popular instructor. In 1912, frustrated at his lack of success in the American poetry world, Frost moved his family to England. They remained there through 1915. In that time he met and befriended many of his British contemporaries, both of major and minor reputation, as well as the American ex-patriot wunderkind Ezra Pound. In 1913, Frost found a London publisher for his A Boy’s Will, and North of Boston appeared in 1914. When the Frosts returned to New England in 1915, both books appeared in the United States--North of Boston to much acclaim. The move to England had proved successful. Frost was suddenly well known in American poetry circles. He would soon be well known everywhere.
Mountain Interval appeared in 1916. Frost began teaching at Amherst College in 1917, then served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan. He would later return to Amherst, then to Michigan, then again to Amherst. He also taught at Harvard and Dartmouth but maintained the longest associations with Amherst and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College. His Selected Poems and New Hampshire were published in 1923. New Hampshire garnered Frost the first of his unmatched four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. West-Running Brook was published in 1928, followed by Frost’s Collected Poems in 1930 (Pulitzer #2), A Further Range in 1936 (Pulitzer #3), A Witness Tree in 1942 (Pulitzer #4), A Masque of Reason in 1945, Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy in 1947, another Complete Poems in 1949, and In the Clearing in 1962.
Frost’s crowning public moment was his recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January of 1960. He died on January 29, 1963.
Frost is a poet who often seems liked for the wrong reasons—a poet who is read much but often not very carefully. The subtle wit of his language, his broad humor, and his frequent despair are too often overlooked for his regional-ness, his folksiness, and his public persona. The neglect of his true talents was compounded by the fact that serious criticism for so long did its best to ignore him. However, regardless of who reads him and for what reasons, what really matters are the poems; they stand alone by virtue of their own strength, independent of the associations surrounding them: Though perhaps influenced by, or in agreement with, statements by Imagists, Frost nonetheless belonged to no school; he worked outside of movements and manifestos to create his own sizeable niche in English literature. In the years covered by this SparkNote we find Frost reaching toward, and finally achieving, a mastery of his art.
Robert Frost is considered the quintessential New England poet, but he spent the first eleven years of his life in San Francisco. Only upon the death of Frost’s father did the family go to live with relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, Frost excelled in high school and fell in love with his co-valedictorian at Lawrence High, Elinor White. They became engaged; Elinor went off to college at St. Lawrence in upstate New York while Frost entered Dartmouth. He was not happy there, however, and left after one semester. Back home, Frost worked as a reporter on a local newspaper and taught school (in part, to help his mother, a teacher with poor control over her students). Frost and Elinor married in 1896, the same year their son Elliott was born. In 1897, Frost matriculated at Harvard University, where he excelled in the Classics. However, the financial and emotional pressures of having a wife, infant, and another child on the way, forced Frost to withdraw after three semesters.
The Frosts moved to a rented farm near Methuen, Massachusetts, and began raising poultry. Tragedy struck in 1900 when three-year-old Elliott died. The family bought a farm in Derry, not far from Lawrence, and Frost settled in to farm, read, write, and raise a family. Three more children were born healthy before the Frosts lost another child in infancy in 1907. In 1906, Frost began teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, where he proved an unconventional and popular instructor. In 1912, frustrated at his lack of success in the American poetry world, Frost moved his family to England. They remained there through 1915. In that time he met and befriended many of his British contemporaries, both of major and minor reputation, as well as the American ex-patriot wunderkind Ezra Pound. In 1913, Frost found a London publisher for his A Boy’s Will, and North of Boston appeared in 1914. When the Frosts returned to New England in 1915, both books appeared in the United States--North of Boston to much acclaim. The move to England had proved successful. Frost was suddenly well known in American poetry circles. He would soon be well known everywhere.
Mountain Interval appeared in 1916. Frost began teaching at Amherst College in 1917, then served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan. He would later return to Amherst, then to Michigan, then again to Amherst. He also taught at Harvard and Dartmouth but maintained the longest associations with Amherst and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College. His Selected Poems and New Hampshire were published in 1923. New Hampshire garnered Frost the first of his unmatched four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. West-Running Brook was published in 1928, followed by Frost’s Collected Poems in 1930 (Pulitzer #2), A Further Range in 1936 (Pulitzer #3), A Witness Tree in 1942 (Pulitzer #4), A Masque of Reason in 1945, Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy in 1947, another Complete Poems in 1949, and In the Clearing in 1962.
Frost’s crowning public moment was his recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January of 1960. He died on January 29, 1963.
"Design"
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
"Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
"Birches"
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
"Mending Wall"
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."