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Robert Frost, America's 'Most Beloved' poet, describes poetry as "an act of clarification." This is the same definition found in a dictionary for art, therefore Frost took semantics very seriously. The descriptive realism shown through his imagery, includes but is not limited to: the horse in "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Wood Pile," and "Mending Wall." We gather more than feelings through his poems, causing one to pause and think; consider each scene.
His style is predominantly classical. Frost loved sonnets and structure, so that his poems physically look like poems on the page, especially when compared with Walt Whitman's flowing lines. This is kind of surprising, considering Frost had no formal literary background, but the man must have had high informational needs and read often, memorizing quite a bit of English poetry (such as Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats particularly). He wrote about the ultimate realities of life. For example, there are two voices present in "Mending Wall": the young man, who sees, "something there is that doesn't love a wall/That wants it down," and the aged voice, saying, "Good fences make good neighbors." The truth here is that boundaries do exist, often met by disagreement between younger and older generations. Generation gaps and misunderstanding, shown through such pastoral daily toil: mending the gaps in a wall between neighbors, keeping each other's worlds from becoming chaotic and natural, uncontrolled. Though widely considered to be a "nature" poet, similar to Emerson, Frost considered himself a realist, focusing on the natural rhythms of the human experience. He’s been quoted as saying, "People forget and poetry makes you remember what you didn't know you knew." He also defined poetry as "a momentary stay against confusion," while classic poets tend to seek answers in Italian and/or English sonnets. Frost utilizes the classic technique of showing simple moments in time, while putting such weight behind them. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" follows a typical Frost rhyme scheme, which is as follows: AABA/BBCB/CCDC/DDDD. His subtle repetition at the end suggests the rest will be for more than just one night, the white of the snow reflecting oblivion; icy death. One can see how he's not really a naturalist, but a realist. Although Robert Frost is not a philosopher, he is a thoughtful writer. "Birches" was badly misunderstood in his time. Apparently, Frost had a dark side he never showed in public, and it may have hurt him in his time. Frost would like to be optimistic and think it was the play of children that wore the branches of a Birch tree, but he faced natural reality instead, almost atheistically. One can almost see a sinister side of him in "Birches," which leaves one with the sense that he might pick a switch from it, with which to beat his kids. In addition, there was something of hate in Frost in the poem "Fire and Ice" (which both destroy). Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Remembering Robert Frost in Essays on American Literature is owned by . Permission to republish Remembering Robert Frost in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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