1874-1963
Author: Ahsan Nabi Khan
A very popular poet for all the times in the American history, Robert Frost claims the readership of his country and abroad. Famed as a farmer-poet of New England, his poems are easier to read and less demanding than his contemporaries, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. This has not prevented his verses from the depth in thought and subtle mystery. Even though brought up in an urban centre, Frost has a well-developed style of folksy, homespun tang of Yankee conversation in his free verse.
Beneath his widely acclaimed image as a poet, Robert Frost has a strong academic base. After he moved from his birthplace in San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, at the age of eleven, he proved to be a top-class student of his high school. He later married his graduating fellow from the same high school, another bright student of his caliber. He apparently did not consider taking degree from the world’s top universities as Harvard and Dartmouth as much as just studying there for the sake of it. Frost taught at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1910 and actively took part in syllabus reforming, theatre direction and poetry. Within a few years he had launched his poetic career, but did not abandon his connection with academic life. Being a poet at residence at Amherst College was a good idea to pursue both the careers. He later continued in such capacity at Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Michigan, Harvard and Yale University. Finally he was awarded honorary degrees from as respected names as Oxford and Cambridge universities. He valued all of these academic degrees, especially the ones from the famed British Institutions.
These were formidable academic achievements in their own right. But these only supplemented his prominence in the literary circles. His main thrust of poetic achievements had started in 1911 when he moved to England selling away his farm in New Hampshire. Ezra Pond received him in England with support and helps to publish the first two volumes of his poems: A Boy’s Will (1913)and North of Boston (1914). Edward Thomas had his favors in reviewing these volumes. Now that he had launched himself as a poet, he came back to America in 1915, grabbed an American publisher and brought his poetry to the American public. In 1916 came another of his book Mountain Interval receiving more fame. Within a decade he received Pulitzer Prize in 1924, then again in 1931, 1937 and 1943. In 1963 Bollingen Poetry Prize was also awarded to him. In his major achievements were also his appointment as goodwill envoy from his country to South America and Russia. In January 1961, he read out his poems at the inauguration ceremony of the United States President John F. Kennedy, as the only poet to be honored by such an invitation.
These were the achievements and honors. But Frost did not just have such a blissful life as it appears. Bringing his name out of obscurity into the mass print was a complex and challenging task. As his age passed, he also suffered loss of his poetic ability, amidst the family pressures he was destined to face. His wife and three children had tragic deaths. Even one of them committed suicide. Frost’s sister and his daughter suffered mental disorders. Having lost his close ones to deaths and diseases, he himself died in 1963.
Frost did not disclose his dreary side of life to the public much often. He never read out his darker, more skeptical poems in public, even when they requested him. The image portrayed was always of a sociable, folksy, happy and congenial person. William Pritchard, one of his critics, explains his image in Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Pritchard declares whenever Frost looked back over his life, he made a picture of it as an adversity overcome. The picture was also that of a literary exile not recognized for his poetic abilities at home. We now know it was not true. His careful management of the public image and then the familiar subjects of his poems gained him recognition everywhere.
As we go through his poems, we see the immediate readability and the poet’s assumption that we know no economic, poetic or political history. There are no foreign words, just the familiar ones spun in idiomatic phrase. He works are in traditional forms of sonnet, heroic couplet, blank verse and four-line stanza. The traditional style demands of us just an appreciation of its symbolic network of meanings. His apparently simple blank verse such as “Birches” and “Mending Wall” and lyrical descriptions of “Desert Places” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” requires a symbolic analysis.
Frost’s view of nature is dramatic. The nature appears powerful and even dangerous. How and why it acts so is not immediately known. It has no implied meaning for the human observer, contradictory to Emerson’s belief that nature is a moral teacher. Against the romantic view, in “Desert Places”, this straightforward wilderness is showed by the “benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express”. “The Most of It” also shows the loneliness echoed by tree-hidden cliff across the lake, which would make one cry out for life and love. But poems like “The Tuft of Flowers” and “Two Look at Two” agree with Emerson’s and Whitman’s ideas of metaphysical connection of man and nature in harmonious completion. Frost understood that the human and natural worlds intersect, but also believed that there exist stark differences, much stronger than the similarities.
The dynamic facets of his personality also have humor and drama. About his academic accolades, he once said he could make a blanket of the many academic hoods he had acquired. You can see his humorous side in “Departmental”, an account of a crazy ant.
The ant would put on a case “one of the hive’s enquiry squad”, and would undoubtedly report “to the higher up at court”, and give an account of anyone “with whom he crosses antennae”. Frost dramatic form reveals in the longer “Home Burial”. He even enjoyed teasing his audiences. As he kept on reading out the mysterious verses of his “Stopping by Woods” in various occasions, he made people think it as funny to consider the efforts of drawing out something large and impressive out of the harmless poem. It was ridiculous to match these verses with man’s existential loneliness or such ultimate matters. He just wanted his readers to enjoy his placement and sound of words in these verses, and not to debate seriously over them. These were his favorite verses. It is about a horse and what it does stopping by the woods.
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
To put his idea on humor and seriousness in a nutshell, his quote reads “If it is with outer seriousness, it must with inner humor; if with inner seriousness, then with outer humor.”
In all his poems we see the care and skillfulness with which Frost used words and sounds. They give the tone of a conversation, even when they are traditional sonnets, or blank verse, or Shakespearean style poems, or some of other varieties. He always emphasized upon tones of voice and sentence sound more than words. In this way, he has advanced more than many modern American poets. His poems can be adorned in elegant performances, private collections and internet community resources.