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Viewing Robert Frost (Part Two) - Page 2

© Audrey McCrone

Frost helped keep the art of poetry alive for the first half of the 20th century in America, and there were few who could match him, as both a poet and public speaker. He was a magnificent public reader. However, when he toured he rarely read lesser-known, lesser-offensive poems, which served to hurt him, politically, while some of his biographers labeled him a public 'poser' (both publicly and privately). Although he was never awarded the Nobel Prize (neither for his diplomacy nor his semantic aptitude), recently there has been a re-examination of Frost's work, and he remains among the first rank of American poets.

I realize that often poets write as a means of therapy, to cope with reality in their own ways, whether that means hiding intent (as Emily Dickinson did, retreating) or as honestly as Robert Frost, who took the realistic approach. We all define poetry slightly differently, but I have learned from Frost’s sense of reality, and he is a subject worthy of notice.

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Works Cited

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Robert Frost's Poems

(New Enlarged Anthology, with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer), © 1971 by Louis Untermeyer and Mary Silva Cosgrave, published by Pocket Books, "a division of Simon & Schuster Inc." NY, NY.

Dr. Harvey Kassebaum's American Literature Class

(1999-2000). I kept my notes and referred to them, and I hope you don’t mind.

Voices and Visions

. Presented by The Annenberg/CPB Project. "Researched, selected and annotated by William Wargo, an instructor at the Community College of Vermont and St. Michael's College."