FREE ESSAY ON ROBERT FROST

ROBERT FROST

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. His father 
was William Frost, a Harvard graduate who was on his way westward 
when he stopped to teach at Bucknell Academy in Pennsylvania for 
extra money. His mother, Isabelle Moodie began teaching math at 
Bucknell while William was there, and they got married and moved to 
San Francisco. They were constantly changing houses, and William 
went from job to job as a journalist. About a year after moving to San 
Francisco, they had Robert. They named him Robert Lee Frost, after 
William's childhood hero, Robert E. Lee. 
Frost's father died from tuberculosis at age thirty-four, in 1885. 
Isabelle took Robert and his sister back east to Massachusetts. Soon 
they moved to Salem, New Hampshire, where there was a teaching 
opening. Robert began to go to school and sit in on his mother's 
classes. He soon learned to love language, and eventually went to 
Lawrence High School, where he wrote the words to the school hymn, 
and graduated as co-valedictorian. Frost read rabidly of Dickens, 
Tennyson, Longfellow, and many others. Frost was then sent to 
Dartmouth college by his controlling grandfather, who saw it as the 
proper place for him to train to become a businessman. Frost read 
even more in college, and learned that he loved poetry. 
His poetry had little success getting published, and he had to 
work various jobs to make a living, such as a shoemaker, a country 
schoolteacher, and a farmer. In 1912 Frost gave up his teaching job, 
sold his farm, and moved to England. He received aid from poets suck 
as Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, and published his first two 
volumes of poetry, A Boy's Will in 1913, and North of Boston in 1914. 
These works were well received not only in England, but also in America. 
Frost returned to America in 1915 and continued writing his poetry. 
He produced many volumes of poetry, among which are Mountain 
Interval (1916), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), 
A Masque of Reason (1945), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost 
received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times (1924, 1931, 1937, 
1943) and became the first poet to read a poem at the presidential 
inauguration of John F. Kennedy. His poetry was based mainly on life 
and scenery in rural New England, and reflected many values of 
American society. 
He died on January 29, 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts. His 
epitaph reads: I had a lovers quarrel with the world. 
Frost once said, I guess I must be just an ordinary man (Cox 5) 
and though he is, without a doubt, and extraordinary man, there is 
some truth in the statement. Throughout his poetry, Frost seems to 
make many attempts to appeal to the common working American and 
his feelings. He does this through the subject matter and themes as 
well as through the diction he uses. An ordinary man is one whose 
imagination and character result from the constant impact of the 
irresistible force of desire against the immovable object necessity, the 
impact of feeling against reason, and the impact of faith against fact 
(Cox 17). It is for this reason that Frosts work speaks to and for all 
men. 
Many of the poems Frost wrote deal with situations set in a 
simple, rural setting. The characters he creates are very realistic, and 
are not romanticized. This is one reason why people can relate to the 
poems. His characters seem more real than their neighbors with 
manifest reservations (Cox 8). One could say that the people are 
more three-dimensional than just imaginative words on a paper. He 
uses farmers and workers in his poetry, and sometimes he pokes fun at 
the more sophisticated people and how they feel. Frosts world is one 
that is related to a real world with its definite boundaries in time and 
space (Gerber 90). 
Frost seems to have a good understanding of the world in which 
his characters, ordinary people, live. He understands the necessities of 
the ordinary man, one who has to work hard to support himself and a 
family, no matter what events may take place. An example is the 
poem Out, Out-, in which a young boy has his hand accidentally cut 
off by a chainsaw, and when he dies, the family, since they were not 
the one dead, turned to their affairs. This theme reoccurs again in 
other poem, where a tragic event occurs, but life goes on, and the 
characters in the poem must ignore some of the pain in order to 
continue to work and live. Another theme he uses often is the pride of 
the working man. He understands that a working mans' value is 
measured by the amount and the quality of the work that he does, and 
an example of a poem where this is used is The Death of the Hired 
Man. In this poem, Silas, an old man, returns to a farm where he has 
worked sporadically in the past, and wishes to work again. The owner 
of the farm and his wife both know this, but they respect the pride of 
the old man, and do not want to damage that pride by refusing to let 
him work to earn his keep. Frost understands the pain and tragedy 
that occurs in life, and is not a stranger to the experiences that make 
men grieve and despair. He has kept his sanity not by blinding 
himself to the elements which make men mad, but rather the most 
important result of his acquaintance with sorrow has been the 
realization that the exercise of the creative faculties is independent of 
the circumstance (Gerber 89). Frost acknowledges this in the poem 
Aquainted with the Night, when he talks about walking through a city 
at night, and seeing all that goes on that those who only walk at night 
cannot see. 
Frost also uses fairly simple words in his poetry, which makes it 
easy for the reader to understand, while making it sound no less 
elegant. The diction relates directly to the subject of his poems, 
because the farm workers and ordinary men do not think or speak with 
complex words, but, like Frost, they use simple words to make a 
complex statement. One could say that Frost's words are like simple, 
single-colored strands of thread, which he weaves together to make an 
elegant, beautiful tapestry.