Robert Frost's Use of Nature in Poetry
Robert Frost, an American poet of the late 19th century, used nature in many of his writings. Frost was very observant of nature, he often used it to represent the emotion of his characters in his poetry. I will use "West-Running Brook" and "Once by the Pacific" to demonstrate Frost's use of nature in his writings.
Robert Frost was born March 26, 1874 in San Francisco ("American Writers" 150). In 1885, the dying request of his father took Frost back to Massachusetts for the burial. Since Frost couldn't afford to travel back to California, Frost remained there and began his writing. Frost led a simple life. He taught, was a New England farmer, worked in a mill, was a reporter, and
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The easiness of his writings though criticized by critics, appeal to the common man (US Literature 509). Once in a interview Frost was asked about his thought process during writing. He said: "I sometimes speak from the last thing that happen to me. I was asked today if I think up my poems. I pick up a lot of things I thought of to make a poem, that is a lot of scattered thoughts through the days that are handy for the poem. That's where the thinking comes in." He just thought up poems in his head and wrote them down, not even a rough draft (Lathem 41).
I will discuss two other writers. Their comparison with Frost will help display what opinion Frost is writing from in his poems. Robert Frost's favorite poet was Mathew Arnold, but Frost disagreed with his belief in nature. Arnold expressed his opinion in "In Harmony with Nature" (Brooks 1). Arnold's arrogance of man over nature was stated in the last two lines of his poem. The last lines basically insulted anyone who would attempt to have a friendship with nature. According to Arnold, if man can't surpass nature, then man is nothing but a slave to nature. Frost knew very well the relationship between human nature and nature, and disagreed with Arnold. Frost thought Arnold's opinion was too harsh and Frost's ideas on nature were slightly more compassionate. Frost believed that nature and man are totally
This poem is typical of the poet’s style because Frost writes a lot about human nature and compares people to nature itself. He judges people and society as a whole. He also uses a lot of literary devices in his poems like metaphors. Frost describes nature in beautiful ways in his poems and “Fire and Ice” is just like the rest of them. It isn’t a departure of common themes.
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” - John Muir. Nature is unpredictable and you never know what you’ll see when you are exploring it. Robert Frost used nature as something to help him describe his feelings in his poems, and showed how much nature can affect someone. Creative writers when surrounded by nature can make something worth reading about it. Frost just so happened to be one of those creative writers and that made him a great success.
When his father died in 1885 he moved to Massachusetts with his mom and sister. He spent his whole life in the Massachusetts area. “Frost attended high school in that state, and then Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester” (Michalowski). “At the age of thirty-eight, Frost decided to move his family to England. While in England his first book, A Boy’s Will, was published in 1913. A few years later he returned to America where his second book, North of Boston, was published.” (Michalowski) “Massachusetts and other New England areas were the setting for the majority of Frost’s poetry. The nature in the New England area played a big role in his life and influenced his poetry a lot.” (Sweeny and Lindroth 7)
Robert Frost is a very well-known poet. Many people were and still are influenced by him and his works. There were different things going on in his life that sometimes impacted his writing, but it never changed the result of his fine works. There are several things that make Frost famous and unique from others.
The world has several great poets and many mind-blowing works, each with its own way of portraying its own message and some the same ones. Jane Flanders wrote the poem named “Cloud Painter” she shows the world from an artistic way, using a painter and his canvas to help the reader picture the true meaning behind the words and images created. Robert Frost takes on the same idea but uses a less complex example so that it makes his work easy to understand while not revealing the real meaning of the poem. Frost and Flanders are just two of the many poets that use nature as a way of explaining the very lessons in life. Each poet has a different way of presenting similar images but from a different perspective.
Growing up Frost had a rough childhood. His father died when he was 11. He had moved in with his grandparents when his mother could not support him and his siblings. This had an effect on Frost with his writing, his poems are usually has a dark background. He had become a farmer at one point, but then gave it up to become a teacher. A lot of event has happened only two of his six children survived past him. This could have had a huge effect with the time period kids usually did not survive. With his writing had come some good he has won many awards like 4 Pulitzer, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (shmoop). His education was all over the place he never got a degree (Poets). He has gone to Harvard, and Amherst Colleges.
Frost was an intelligent man. He faced many hardships throughout his life and poetry is one of the few things that helped him get through the rough times. Alongside his wife, Elinor, they lost most of their children and struggled to find poets who would take a chance on new poets such as Frost. Even when faced with many tough choices in life, Elinor’s complete support through Frost’s journey on becoming a poet helped light some inspiration to frost as well as helped with helping him continue his journey. After a few years, one of the first poets to believe and take a look a Frost’s work were authors Pound and Thomas. Through this, Frost became acquaintances with Pound and very good friends with Thomas. Through the meaningful relationships formed
Robert Frost was a profound American poet who remains influential to this day. His versatility of theme, and his ability to relate to the human condition makes his work timeless. His simplistic writing style has made him accessible to generations of students. Much of his writing was motivated by the many tragedies he endured beginning with the death of his father and including the deaths of of his own children and his wife who died of cancer.
Frost also uses the form of the poem to establish himself as a nature poet. He encloses the subject of nature inside the traditional sonnet form, connecting himself to one of the foremost nature poets, Wordsworth. While he uses the same form and subject as Wordsworth, he creates his own rhyme scheme, breaking from the Petrarchan form used by Wordsworth and showing that the material inside the casing of this sonnet is not a traditional nature poem.
make a decision and at the end of the day, the nature of the decision
Robert Lee Frost, born in 1874, grew up in California. He was an extraordinary student, and ended his high school career as one of the valedictorians. He was very intelligent, and even went on to Dartmouth College, though he did not graduate. He was married to his former high school classmate Elinor White in 1895. Together they gave birth to six children. Later in life he attended Harvard College. Robert Frost was known for his love of nature, and portrays it in many of his poems. For part of his life he worked as a farmer, which could have contributed to his love for nature. Though Frost clearly states, “I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems” (frostfriends.org). Frost obviously does not want people to think that he writes strictly about nature. He wants others to see the meaning behind his poetry, as well as the “human psychology” hidden underneath his poems. Frost did love nature though, not to be mistaken. He did use nature a lot throughout his poetry, he just did not want people to skim the surface of his poems and think they were about nature when they
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “ The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
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).
In order to understand where Robert Frost is coming from in his poetry it is important to learn about the experiences in his life. Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. His father was from
Poets also use the landscape in writing poems because of the inspiration that they get from such places. This could be based on some memory or the history of the place and