Robert Frost free essay sample

A discussion on the way in which Robert Frost is able to speak in two languages at once the language of the place at hand, and a broader language that speaks to the experience of many people in times and places very different from the poets own. (more) Robert Frost free essay sample Frost is the kind of author who celebrates simple, everyday things like rural happenings, with vivid imagery. He delves into the mystery of existence, and, in many of his texts, we see a struggle against chaos. Frosts poems mostly are centered on a naturalistic theme – beauties and terrors of nature, conflicts between individual desires and social obligations, and the value of labor. 1 Though one can question the link between nature and aspects such as labor, a more zoomed-out look of the world tells us that the activities of human beings are also a part of nature, and analyzing human behavior and the society of human beings can be perceived as a way of studying nature itself. Frost s Early works Frost has always been considered as a modern American poet, but many say that it is impossible to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry. 2 This was because his writing was unique and unconventional – it was different from what his contemporaries accepted to be poetry during the turn of the twentieth century. We will write a custom essay sample on Robert Frost or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page His works did not interest the American publishers in 1912. This made him, along with his family, to move to Buckinghamshire, England in 1912, where he met famous literary figures such as Ezra Pound. He also released his first major collection of verse in 1913, after moving to England, and this was named A Boys Will. A year later, his second publication, north of Boston, was underway. This volume contained one of is best works, Mending Wall. Mending Wall was a meditation on individualism and community inspired by the annual springtime ritual of repatching walls of rock that divide New England farms. Frosts works are often described as meditative or ruminative. He deals with themes which were related to the everyday world, but his works allowed the reader to view normal and everyday things of the world, like fire, water, birds, or any other element of nature, and even obscure and dubious subjects like heaven, the unknown bliss and paradise, in a way they have not been seen before. Some critics say this is not a different way of viewing things but simply his (Frosts) way of viewing things. Nevertheless, a poet needs uniqueness to be established. Frost s Later years Through the years, more experimentation and exploration changed Frosts outlook towards the world. He becomes more societal and less analytical. He becomes more of a free-thinking person than he was before, and develops a broader perspective about himself, and the world around him. He often discusses about the world of men, politics, science, and any other worldly topic that interested him, and were common between him and his readers. However, many of his works dealing with nature continued to awe the readers. Because of his uncanny ability to take the reader right to the place that is being discussed in his poems, his poems like Spring Pools and Tree at My Window are still celebrated by many readers. To Frost, metaphor is really what poetry is all about. He is notably a poet of metaphors more than anything else. 3 Meter and Form- Throughout his life, though his topics of interests underwent a change, Frost always adhered himself to the conventional methods of writing poetry. They liberated him from the burden of being an experimentalist. Frost, as he says it himself in his essay The Constant Symbol stuck to regular verses, followed the rules and conventions of metrical writing. He never ventured into the territories of free verse, like many of his fellow-poets were doing. He maintained the line-length and rhyme scheme in each and every one of his poems, and he claimed that the freshness of a poem comes out of not thinking to set it to verse. He developed his own theory called sentence-sounds. According to him, poetry is less the craft of images — of vision — than the craft of sentences. This piece of information has been gathered from his essays and his notebooks (which were called laboratory by Robert Faggen, a Frost Scholar) and his use of this theory can also be seen in his poems. Although poets certainly talk a great deal about aural effects, Frost meant something more complicated: the quality of intonation in song. In one notebook, he writes, The sentence almost seems the soul of a certain set of words. 4 Frosts poems always had a New England dialect to it, and though this could have been a result of his upbringing, many critics believe that the similarity between his sentence structuring and New Englands local dialect was simply coincidental. The sentence structuring stems out not from his background or cultural surrounding, but from his want to make the words give a stronger and clearer image to the reader. He wanted the words of his poem to be in harmony with the poets mood, and the topic the poet deals with. One of his most analyzed works, which deals with the structuring of the words in his poems, is The Death of the Hired Man. In this poem, an entire conversation between a farmer and his wife, according to Ezra Pound, is very different from the natural speech of the newspapers, and of many professors. ( Literature Resource Center – Robert Frost). Frosts view of nature gave many critics an insight into his regional representation. He did not, in any way, belong to a parti cular region, at least when it comes to influencing his poems. He was a realist, and the triggers to his poems were solely nature, and this did not have anything to do with the place he stayed in. After all, nature was everywhere, and Frost was amused by simple things like a grasshopper sitting on a blade of grass. Though Frosts works were highly acclaimed, as he grew older, his works became less and less enjoyable to the readers. This could have been a result of the change in Frosts mentality, and his outlook towards the world, but also could have been because of the change in taste of the people – the readers wanted something different from the poets, different from what they have been reading all these years. Many critics go urther in criticizing Frost by talking about his simplistic philosophy and failure to delve deeply into thematic concerns. Some critics even go to the extent of telling that Frost was mainly focused about himself, and his immediate surroundings, like his neighbors, or with the Americans in his neighborhood. ( Literature Resource Center – Robert Frost). However, there are always people who have liked Frost, and will continue to read his wo rks, analyzing them, saying that where his poems arise from – they begin with emotional feelings, like being surprised, or feeling remorse. Robert Frost free essay sample FrostRobert Frost was an American Poet highly regarded for his realistic depiction and use of imagery involved in conceptualizing rural life. His work commonly used the monstrous theme of death and nature, using the setting of each piece to examine complex philosophical and social subject matters. The poems I chose to analyze are â€Å"The Vanishing Red†, â€Å"Home Burial†, and â€Å"Death of a Hired Man. † Each poem exhibits the theme of â€Å"death† in their own way as a result of the differences in setting and through introduction of specific characters. Despite the parallels in theme in these poems, Frost uses a variety of situations and concepts of death for the focus of each poem. The first poem I analyzed was â€Å"The Vanishing Red†. This poem describes the murder of the last Native American resident of a New England mill town named Acton (or action). The miller, in an act of pure racial hatred, shoved John (The red man) down into the mill’s wheel pit. We will write a custom essay sample on Robert Frost or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page John is then shredded to death in-between the gears of the machine he’s pushed into. My interpretation of this poem is that it really describes the death of a group a people that help build this nation. We are forgetful that these â€Å"Red Men† help paved this country into the land it is today. The act of forgetting is apparent in lines 9 through 13: You cant get back and see it as he saw it. / Its too long a story to go into now. / Youd have to have been there and lived it. / Then you wouldnt have looked on it as just a matter / Of who began it between the two races. In other words, the killing of the last Native American in Action stands for the entire history or the entire act of colonization of the United States. Another portrayal of the theme Death is seen through the imagery used by Frost in â€Å"The Vanishing Red. The best example of this is the frantic fish or the salmon sturgeon. This metaphor can be seen as a two-fold force. The first we see as a fish flopping in the water; more as a dying force just as we exemplified in the Native Americans. Also we can see them as attempting to continue their species by flinging themselves into the maw of death. Another use of imagery is present through the character of the miller. The Miller represents the American Government in terms of control. He gives no reason for his cruel, unjustified murder and makes compunction about what he does. The fact he is the miller, in control of the place of the murder, joins with the amount of direction he holds over other by refusing to license them to laugh. These powers are equivalent to the amount of control the government holds over its people. This control is displayed in lines 6 and 7, â€Å"The fact he is the miller, in control of the place of the act, combines with the amount of control he holds over other by refusing to license them to laugh. These powers are tantamount to the amount of control the government holds over its people. The choice of the Mill as the location of the murder directs the reader into the heart of the Frosts consideration of what was going on at the time that the people allowed such horrific things to take place. The Mill, with its general racket and large turning wheels, grinding away not only the grains but also now bone and blood, stands as a memorial to the revolution of industry. Frost uses language ripe with symbolic meaning to address the murd er of a people and the silence of a nation that observed it as it happened. The next poem I chose to analyze is â€Å"Home Burial†. This poem is a complicated and rich allegory of human feelings and communications both are inadequately expressed and eventually failed. The poem is rich with depictions of grief, roasting anger, and great frustrations as the couple seek to come to grips with the passing of a child and their own differing and dysfunctional coping methods. The poem starts with the wife at the top of the stairs and the husband attempting to communicate with her. We later find out that under the circumstances this is expected futility, because this is an unresolved argument from its most recent stalemate. The man tries to approach her and she cowers away, but in spite of his aggression she bares it and tolerates her inquisitive stare. Sure that he wouldnt see,/Blind creature. † She is both scared and scornful at the same time while her husband is continually wondering what she is staring at out of the window at the top of the stairs. At the root of this sad drama is their childs death. The woman stands at the top of the steps and stares through a window to the burial ground of the child. When the husband realizes what she is looking at and draws awareness to the childs grave, the wife departs and moves down the stairs. She moves both physically and emotionally away. Judging from the husbands antagonism and irritation, we get the impression that she repeatedly does this. This is where the theme of death is introduced. As the husband turns his attention to the graveyard he notices that is â€Å"Not so much larger than a bedroom. † Which leads us to the portrayal of the lifelessness in the gravesite and we also get the impression that the death of the child was also the death of the couple’s sexual relations. As the poem continues, the couple begins to fight and we eventually see the wife’s sensitivity; while we see the husband’s insensitivity. She supports her accusations of his insensitivity by continually repeating what was said by the husband after he buried the child: Three foggy mornings and one rainy day/Will rot the best birch fence a man can build. (Line 92-93) These arguments led one to believe to feel that this was the most powerful illustration of the enormous gap in their communication and understanding. The whole backbone of their relationship and this poem is the troubles of dealing with the loneliness of death and the inability to grasp the true nature of having to deal with the death of a loved one. The communication between the man and wife is both revealing and pointless. In fact, the communication is not really communication. It is a dialog illustrating their positions of both misunderstanding and disagreement. I find this poem to be very interesting yet very depressing. It can have so many views interpreted. A man and a woman dealing with the death of a close one brought about a lack of communication and understanding which terribly hurt their relationship. Everyone is entitled to express their emotions they want, but the wife does not like the fact that the husband wont express himself. The husband has accepted the tragic death but the wife is not able to take up her life again, leaving them both completely alienated from one another. Death is the hardest reality of one’s life that is why they found it so hard to understand each other at the death of their first born.