Robert Frost 1874-1963

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Robert Frost1874-1963
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Robert Frost

• Biography
• Frost on Poetry
• Reception
• Texts
• Regional Poetry

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Frost on Poetry

• the ear does it. The ear is the only true
  writer and the only true reader.

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• Unless you are at home in the metaphor,
  unless you've had your proper poetical education
  in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
  Because you are not at ease with figurative
  values you don't know the metaphor in its
  strength and weakness. You don't know how far
  you can expect to ride it and when it may break
  down with you. You are not safe in science you
  are not safe in history.
• Education for Poetry

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• What I like about Bergson and Fabre is that
  they have bothered our evolutionism so much with
  the cases of instinct they have brought up. You
  get more credit for thinking if you restate
  formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under
  formulae, but all the fun is outside saying
  things that suggest formulae but won't
  formulate--that almost but don't quite formulate.
  I should like to be so subtle at this game as to
  seem to a casual person altogether obvious. The
  casual person would assume that I meant nothing
  or else I came near enough meaning something he
  was familiar with to mean it for all practical
  purposes. Well well well.
• Letter to Louis Untermeyer

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• Writing free verse is like playing tennis with
  the net down.
• Robert Frost

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Reception

• At the same time, the book is
  extraordinarily free from a young mans
  extravagances there is no insistent obtrusion of
  self-strain after super-things. Neither does it
  belong to any modern school, nor go in harness
  to any new and twisted theory of art. It is so
  simple, lucid, and experimental that, reading a
  poem, one can see clearly with the poets own
  swift eye, and follow the trail of his glancing
  thought. One feels that this man has seen and
  felt seen with a revelatory, a creative vision
  felt personally and intensely and he simply
  writes down, without confusion or affectation,
  the results thereof. Rarely today is it our
  fortune to fall in with a new poet expressing
  himself in so pure a vein.
• The Academy, 1913

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• The language ranges from a never vulgar
  colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and
  intense simplicity. There are moments when the
  plain language and lack of violence make the
  unaffected verses look like prose, except that
  the sentences, if spoken aloud, are most
  felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion.
• Edward Thomas, 1914

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• Mr. Frost is an honest writer, writing from
  himself, from his own knowledge and emotion not
  simply picking up the manner which magazines are
  accepting at the moment, and applying it to
  topics in vogue. He is quite consciously and
  effortlessly putting New England rural life into
  verse. He is not using themes that anybody could
  have cribbed out of Ovid.
• Ezra Pound, 1914

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Randall Jarrell, 1953

• Besides the Frost that everybody knows
  there is one whom no one even talks about.
  Everybody knows what the regular Frost is the
  one living poet who has written good poems that
  ordinary readers like without any trouble and
  understand without any trouble the conservative
  editorialist and self-made apothegm-joiner, full
  of dry wisdom and free, complacent, Yankee
  enterprise the Farmer-Poet--this is an imposing
  private role perfected for public use, a sort of
  Olympian Will Rogers out of Tanglewood Tales
  and, last or first of all, Frost is the standing,
  speaking reproach to any orther good modern poet
  'If Frost can write poetry that's just as easy as
  Longfellow you can too--you do too.' It is this
  'easy' side of Frost that is most attractive to
  academic readers, who are eager to canonize any
  modern poet who condemns in example the modern
  poetry which they condemn in precept and it is
  this side that has helped get him neglected or
  depreciated by intellectuals--the reader of Eliot
  or Auden usually dismisses Frost as something
  inconsequentially good that he knew all about
  long ago.

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Randall Jarrell, 1953

• So far from being obvious, optimistic,
  orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily
  subtle and strange.

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Lionel Trilling, 1959

• For a long time I was alienated from Frosts
  great canon of work by what I saw in it, that
  either itself seemed to denigrate the work of the
  critical intellect or that gave its admirers the
  ground for making the denigration.
• I have to say that my Frost is not the Frost
  I seem to perceive existing in the minds of so
  many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who
  confounds the characteristically modern practice
  of poetry by his notable democratic simplicity of
  utterance on the contrary. He is not the Frost
  who reassures us by his affirmation of old
  virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of
  feeling anything but.

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J. Donald Adams, 1959

• Professor Trilling confessed that he thinks of
  Frost as a 'terrifying' poet, and that 'the
  universe he conceives is a terrifying universe.'
  Holy mackerel! Frost simply sees the universe as
  it is and accepts it. He isn't terrified by what
  he sees, and neither should we be. He takes it
  in his stride, which is one reason why he is in
  there pitching at 85.

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T. M. Guerin, 1959

• I hope Robert Frost was having a nice plate of
  buckwheat cakes and Vermont maple syrup as he
  read Mr. Adams' remarks. He couldn't have done
  better unless he had taken the so-called
  professor out to the woodshed.

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Emory Neff, 1959

• Frost might have had a Novel prize if so many
  New York critics hadn't gone whoring after
  European gods.

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Mending WallSomething there is that doesnt
love a wall

• There is something that doesn't love a wall
• Something doesn't love a wall
• Something hates a wall
• X hates a wall
• A wall is hated by X

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Movement

• Rumination 1-11
• The actual activity 12-27
• Spring is the mischief in me 28-38
• I see him there 38-45

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A Famous Title Frank Lentricchia, Modernist
Quartet

• a biography of Frost
• a study of U.S. race relations
• at least one work of feminist scholarship
• a study of U.S. social conditions
• an essay that excoriates American literary
  theorists for not going the way of the Italian
  Marxist Antonio Gramsci
• a proposal for alternatives to prison for
  nonviolent felons
• a biography of an eighteenth-century Jesuit
• a self-help text which occupied the New York
  Times best-seller list for over seven years
• an analysis of a crisis in highway repairs and
  maintenance in Connecticut

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