Robert Frost

Frost’s various speaking tones can be shown in his well-known poem “Mending Wall.” Throughout the poem the speaker’s voice is open and relaxed, yet, inward and musing. It helps welcome the reader and at the time entices the reader into a riddle which becomes essential to the poem’s meaning. The speaker’s eventual speculation about what might not “love a wall” becomes a description of the struggle of wall-mending and begins to wonder why he and his neighbor have met to carry out the task in the first place. The speaker’s range of tone throughout the poem varies from seriousness to fantasy to glee.

Robert Frost is a pastoral poet. His love for rural life revealed in his work. He incorporates major themes: one's life choices, isolation, and nature in his works.

Often a poet’s greatest work comes from life experiences. This may be partially due to the realness of the experience and the hearer’s ability to relate. This effect of relating to an author can be accomplished with themes and tone of a poem. A poet’s “attitude” can also be expressed through the similes and metaphors that he or she uses. Robert Frost is a poet whose attitude and beliefs about life show through his poems. He has been described as a romantic due to his themes, but that may be inaccurate due to the complexity and depth of his work. With a further understanding of the history of the author a new idea of him may be realized. Robert Frost’s history, lifestyle, and outlook influenced his work; this is shown when he attributes the relationship between man and the universe with alienation, nature, and death.

Robert Frost writes his poems with a connection to nature. Frost though grew up in an urban setting. Though in the video “A Conversation with Robert Frost”, Frost stated that of the jobs he had growing up farming impacted him the most. Farming might have jump started his fascination with nature at a young age. By being raised in such an urban setting and not being as in touch with nature, Frost gained a fascination for it. Frost’s attitude towards nature is that of wonder and appreciation. In frost’s poem “The Tuft of Flowers” it shows the theme of nature, such as “But he turned first, and led my eye to look / At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,” (21-22). In his poems, it is often mentioned the relationship between nature and man. This

“Mending Wall” begins with the persona who desires companionship and wants to create a connection with his neighbour. It is seen that through the ramifications of discovery, the persona is confronted which leads to him forming a negatively changed perspective of himself and his neighbour. His desire to engage and create a connection with his neighbour is conveyed through his constant questioning of the need for a wall. He asks questions such as “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out”, which allows him to realise that walls prevent and hinder connections. As a result of this, he attempts to convince his neighbour and show him how walls are useless and needless in society. Through the analogy “he is all pine and I am apple orchard/My apple trees will never get across” the persona tries to further convince his neighbour to remove the wall which hinders human connection. However the neighbour uses the aphorism “Good fences make good neighbors” throughout the poem to respond to the questioning of the persona which shows how he is incapable of making a connection due to his lack of understanding. The wall in this poem symbolically shows the barriers which are present in society which prevent and hinder communication and

Frost has been known to deem all writing devoid of human tones to be poor writing on the account that a reader cannot be expected to care about what is written by an uncaring author. He came to criticize poetry in which “all tones of human speech had been eliminated, leaving sound of sense without roots in experience” () after being criticized himself for writing in the opposite manner, a critique that led to the epiphany of that being his exact intention. It was Ezra Pound who deemed Frost as having “the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing as he saw it” () but Frost had no intention of being associated with the Imagists. He fought hard against the misinterpretation of his poetry, striving to embody the unconscious principles

The speaker of the poem challenges his own beliefs as well as the neighbors by trying to get him to see that the wall is no longer necessary. By challenging the neighbor the speaker explores his other possible options. Each spring by building the wall back up so quickly, they could be missing out on opportunities. The narrator views his neighbor’s opinions as old-fashioned and ignorant: “Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/ In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed” (40-41). The other man is so stuck in his ways he will not even consider the narrator’s thoughts. People in today’s society have become comfortable with how they live their daily lives. Humans tend to resist change because it is out of their comfort zone. There are people who will challenge others beliefs, but it is up to the individual to choose whether or not they want to accept change and become enlightened. Some are comfortable with change and accept it willingly, such as the narrator who thinks that the wall is unnecessary. The neighbor repeatedly says, “Good fences make good neighbors” (line 47), as his

Robert Frost was noteworthy for the way in which he was able to use symbolism in his poems that deal with nature. Since his poetry about nature does not seem to depict subjects in quite a positive light, he has been criticized for not being as unrealistic as other poets. Frost drew many parallels between nature and his views on humanity and the human mind. Frost wanted to emphasize the relationship a man holds with nature. While we may wish that nature could help us to make decisions and succeed in the world, nature has no mind or will of its own. When we are “one” with nature, we are mentally and socially alone. Frost also wrote about people alone with the wilderness in order to help us understand what he felt may be some probable mental consequences

Even though Robert Frost was not known for quite some time, his life, themes, and praise make him a true figure in literature. However, it is his style that make him stand out in literature. His life was full of education, family, and profounding events. This man used many themes in his works to convey a message to readers. Frost received much praise and awards, including the Poet Association award, the Pulitzer prize, and the Bollinger prize. The styles Frost used were profound and filled with rhythm and rhyme.

For this course, I wrote an essay entitled, “A Gaze into Robert Frost’s Poetry,” in which I analyze the distinctive aesthetic elements of Frost’s poetry. The essay examined and compared the aesthetic elements of Frost’s poems “Birches,” “In White,” “Out, Out-” and “Home Burial.” I wrote that “Frost’s poetry focuses on descriptive imagery and simplicity in language” (12). “Frost is well known for writing poetry that uses images of landscapes and simple language to depict country folk life” (12). “The language in Frost’s poetry is simple because it focuses on the spoken language used in regional areas he wrote about” (12). I concluded in my essay that “[t]he remarkably subtle rather than obvious depth of Frost’s poetry contributes to ‘the richness of his art’”

The wall in the poem is a stone wall between the fields belonging to two neighbors. In the spring they work together to “set the wall between us once again” (14). The wall is a symbol for division, separation and barriers to friendship, communication and relationships. The author’s use of the tactile image of “we wear our fingers rough with handling them” (20) shows how much effort is involved in maintaining walls. Maintaining distance between other people also requires effort.

One of the most humble of men to be awarded a modest four Pulitzer prizes and casually accept a Congressional Gold Medal for his works, Robert Frost arguably carried a literary movement and immortalized himself in history. While viewed as a naturalist, Frost is noted for the New England regionalism that is prevalent in his works. By acting on the world and surrendering to his poetry, Frost held a cynical mirror of bi-polarity to his world and developed it through regional naturalism.

     A very interesting point regarding Frost’s relationship with nature is that he views it with ambiguity. Most assume that Frost is a nature lover; however, while this is true in part, Frost also views nature as having the capability of being destructive. Lynen speaks of this duality by saying, “You cannot have one without the other: love of natural beauty and horror at the remoteness and indifference of the physical world are not opposites but different aspects of the same view” (7). On speaking of Frost’s dualistic view of nature, Phillip L. Gerber states, “For nature is hard as she is soft, she can destroy and thwart, disappoint, frustrate, and batter” (132). Robert Frost views nature as an ‘alien force capable of destroying man’, but on the flip side, he also views “man’s struggle with nature as a heroic battle” (quoted in Thompson).

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference” (Beginning sentence of The Road not Taken Frost). Robert Frost is the most beloved poet in America and around the world. Many of his famous works in poetry include: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken” (Which the first sentence of this poem is the beginning introit), “A Boys Will”, and many other great works. Many would not know, but Frost was not widely successful until he was thirty-eight years old. What happens to be the most surprising thing about Robert Frost was not only how fast he was known, but how he did it. In this composition it will describe the slow and steady rise of Robert Frost’s