Robert Frost March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963

1. Robert FrostMarch 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963 "A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words."

2. Interesting Facts • Frost was virtually unknown until almost 40 • He wrote much of his verse in a log cabin in Ripton in central Vermont. His grandfather bought a farm for the family in Derry, New Hampshire (you can still visit this farm). Frost spent nine years there, farming and writing — the poultry farming was not successful but the writing drove him on, and back to teaching for a couple more years. In 1912, the Frost gave up the farm, sailed to Glasgow, and later settled in Beaconsfield, outside London. • Frost was a man famous for contradictions, known as a cranky and egocentric personality

3. Poetic Style • Frost was a Vermonter, tied to the land, with few original ideas, but gifted with an extraordinary writing technique and power of observation. • He wrote of the truths that could be found in nature. • Ten years of raising chickens and children provided metaphors on which he could draw for a lifetime. • Frost believed that traditional poetic forms provided a sense of order whereas many of his contemporaries abandoned metrical forms for free verse. • He disliked free verse, comparing it to "playing tennis without a net.” • Unlike his contemporaries, Frost did not use many allusions to the classics; his poems were more simplistic.

4. Themes • Pastoral: What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earth's fertility. • Below the surface of Frost's poems are dreadful implications, what Rosenthal calls his "shocked sense of the helpless cruelty of things.” • Frost looked to the natural world for metaphors for the human condition and for meaning in the modern world. • He wrote during the disjointed first half of the twentieth- century: during World War I, the Depression, and the Era of the Lost Generation. So it's no wonder that Frost's writings are less affirming than the transcendentalists. • Frost is sometimes grouped with the writers of the “Lost Generation.” Many of these writers began to use their writings to protest the lack of true purpose that they thought was so pervasive with the materialism of the 1920’s. • Inevitable human alienation and isolation, limitations of man, self-discovery were common themes.

5. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know.    His house is in the village though;    He will not see me stopping here    To watch his woods fill up with snow.    My little horse must think it queer    To stop without a farmhouse near    Between the woods and frozen lake    The darkest evening of the year.    He gives his harness bells a shake    To ask if there is some mistake.    The only other sound’s the sweep    Of easy wind and downy flake.    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. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/frost.html What do the woods represent? Is this a poem in which suicide is contemplated?).

6. The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

7. 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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwJ-ppxCGPk

8. Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpPkwyincI