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Frost: One of the Greats

© Linda Sue Grimes

According to The American Tradition in Literature, Frost's "art is an act of clarification, an act which, without simplifying the truth, renders it in some degree accessible to everyone." And though his scenery was primarily the New England countryside, "people who have never seen New Hampshire or Vermont, reading his poems in California or Virginia, experience their revelation." His poetry has an important universal appeal. Robert Frost is one America's most beloved poets. His poems speak to the heart and make us re-live our experiences, as all great poetry does.

You can find in Frost's canon poems for each season of the year. Two of his best loved and most anthologized poems are "After Apple-Picking" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," the former taking place is late fall and the latter on the first day of winter.

If you are a student in a class studying Frost's poems, you might find you can write a useful paper comparing and/or contrasting these poems. You will notice that the speaker of each poem emphasizes "sleep"; what do you think he is implying? Does he mean more than ordinary nightly repose? Read the poems for fun, but study them for the experience they impart.

Another Frost poem that takes place in fall is "The Road Not Taken." How can you be sure it takes place in fall? Well, the yellow wood and the fact that a lot of leaves have fallen. This poem is often misunderstood. That the "road" is a symbol for making choices is clear enough, but many students read into the poem the notion that the speaker is claiming he is happy with the choice he made, that he is happy that he chose to walk down the road he selected. But if you look closer you will see that the speaker cannot be making that claim. And what the speaker actually claims could be the focus of a useful essay.

A Frost poem that takes place in spring is "Mending Wall." This poem lends itself to a character study: how much can we know about the speaker and about his neighbor? The speaker says that spring brings out the mischief in him, but what does it bring out in his neighbor? We know the action of the poem takes place in Spring, because there are two references to the season: "at spring mending-time we find them there," referring the gaps in the wall that have to be mended. And, of course, as mentioned earlier the speaker refers to spring when he says, "Spring is the mischief in me."

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