bizzle43 YO's List: Robert Frost

• Lawrance Thompson’s definitive, three-volume biography, published between 1966 and 1976, which revealed that the poet had been a vain, vindictive, inordinately ambitious, and frequently cruel man in his private life who had caused great suffering to his family and friends. Thompson also emphasized that Frost’s public and poetic stoicism had sometimes masked acute depression, self-doubt, and guilt and that he had suffered many personal miseries and tragedies—the insanity of his sister Jeanie, the deaths of his daughter Marjorie and his wife in 1934 and 1938, and the suicide of his only son in 1940.
• Poetically, Frost can be considered a link between an older era and modern culture, and his relationship to literary modernism was equivocal.

  • just before modernism. could be linked to it but more as an inspiration than anything else
    
    
    
    equivocal = questionable
• His early poems are similar to those of nineteenth-century American fireside poets such as Longfellow and English Georgians such as Thomas and Gibson. And many of his mature poems have more in common with the works of William Wordsworth or Robert Browning than they do with those of his contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or William Carlos Williams. Frost eschewed free verse and wrote his poems in traditional rhymes and metrical forms like blank verse. Moreover, like his popular New England contemporary, Edward Arlington Robinson, Frost wrote many poems which are dramatic narratives and can be appreciated, like prose fiction, for their characterizations and plot development.
• Intellectually, Frost was the heir of the nineteenth-century romantic individualism exemplified by Emerson and Thoreau. He assumed the lone individual could question and work out his or her own relationships to God and existence—preferably in a natural setting and with a few discrete references to Christianity and Transcendentalism. Unlike Thoreau, however, Frost was never daring enough to challenge the social order boldly in his writings—though he was capable of the conservative cynicism of “Provide, Provide.” Nor was he able to express the romantic affirmations that characterize many of Emerson’s works. The poet, to Emerson, was a seer whose poems should contain truths analogous to religious revelations. Frost’s view of the poet was more modest. In his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” which he published as a preface to his Collected Poems, he emphasized that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom....it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”
  

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