Analyzing Robert Frost’s Statement Writing Free Verse is Like Playing Tennis without a Net (original) (raw)

ROBERT FROST'S POETRY: A STUDY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE

The poet/critic Randall Jarrell often praised Frost's poetry and wrote, "Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot, seems to me the greatest of the American poets of this century. Frost's virtues as a poet and artist are extraordinary. No other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech‖. Robert Frost loved nature. His poetry was full of emotional appearances about his personal life and behavior. In addition, his literary verses are uncomplicated and profound. He also wrote plain fictions about common people, usually inhabitants of rustic New England. Robert Frost wrote exceptional prose, applying ordinary and sincere language; his poems enclose concept of symbolism, obscure significances, sounds, rhyme, meter, metaphors and more. Robert Frost was, quite simply, one of America's leading 20 th century poets. It could be because he wrote poems about rural life drawing a distinct contrast between its innocence and peacefulness and the depression and corruption of city life. It could also be because he used traditional verse forms that were understood by one and all. It might even be that people sensed his step forward in the direction of modernizing the interplay of rhythm and meter while writing exactly how people spoke. His poetry has been called traditional, experimental, regional, universal, and even pastoral. The world of Frost's poetry is beautiful but it is also harsh and uncaring. Frost wrote that, ―Man has need of nature, but nature has no need of man‖. The poem Birches contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground temporally by a boy's swinging on them or permanently by an ice storm. But as the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child's play and natural phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge: ― I like to think some boy's been swinging them But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice – storms do‖

An Inquiry into the Major Themes Loomed Large in Robert Frost's Poems

Scholars Research Publisher , 2021

An attempt has been made to glimpse at the major themes of Robert Frost's poems. Frost is a modern American poet of the twentieth century whose poems are furnished with variegated themes. He is a poet who typifies the country's traditional cultural inheritance. He has absorbed the essence what constitutes America. He is also called the ‗voice of America' ; so to say, he has represented the faith, doubt, joys, sorrows, emotions, thoughts and ideas of the people of America. He is a poet of man whose poems deal with Man in relation with the universe crossing the border of America. Frost sees that man's environment is quite indifferent to man. To him, nature is neither absolutely benevolent to man nor hostile always. He regards nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration, nonetheless fraught with peril. Thus man is essentially alone. A barrier is made between man and his immediate environment, between man and the universe, between man and man. His work shows strong sympathy for the values of the early American society. He employs themes from the early 1900's rural life in New England. He uses the pastoral setting to examine the complex social and philosophical themes. Frost concentrates on ordinary subject matters but his emotional range is wide and deep, and his poems shift dramatically from a tone of humorous banter to the passionate expression of tragic experience. He also uses language considering his subject matters. His poetry is structured within traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes, and vernacular speeches. Daniel Hoffman regards Frost as the founder of-a new aesthetic of poetry as speeches.‖ This article aims at discussing Frost's major themes highlighting his poetic mastery.

English Literature and Language Review Dignified Portrayal of Common Men's Issues in Frost's Poetry

2016

Though Robert Frost is a very familiar figure in the field of modern poetry, he is still greater as a poet of common man. Frost has illuminated things and objects as common, modest, and humble as a wood pile and as uncommon as prehistoric people's culture and manner, as natural as a singing bird in its sleep and mechanistic as the revolt of a factory worker. But, his central subject is humanity. His poetry deals with a particular aliveness because it shows living people. Other poets, like Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and Eliot, have written about the people's lives, style, and common issues of their contemporary age. But Robert Frost's poems focus on the people's every occurrence; they work, walk and gossip, and tell stories about freedom of common speech. People, in Frost's writings are all rural New Englanders. He knows them intimately and his portrayal of his society is realistic, modest, and vivid. His poetry has cropped out of his farmer's world, every part of which he knows, and knows how to render it in words with a brilliant, offhand ease. Their lonely farms, the cold winters, and all-too-brief summers; the imminence of failure, of the wilderness, of death-all give us regarding the minute sense of loving people perfectly and minutely. The tension comes out in his oeuvre and the moments of relaxation by contrast an almost extravagant gaiety. The hard-hood, to repeat, is that of a man's life in New Hampshire, as such, not imposed by the poet, though Frost describes it with a professional mastery: At the time of his death he was widely considered the most distinguished American poet. His lyrical and meditative poems speak in the same colloquial New England voice as his narratives. Anyone can read the poems with pleasure, but each lyric is a metaphor where the more practical reader finds a deeper satisfaction (Francis, 1992). Frost's art or characterizations are beyond poetic imagination and fanciful mood, and he shows great artistic self-restraint in staying within a poet's boundary. But working within his range, he achieves great vividness, diversity and subtlety. Frost's seriousness and honesty; the bare sorrow with which common issues are accepted as they are, neither exaggerated nor explained away; many poems in which there are the real people with a real speech and real thought and real emotion-all this, in conjunction with so much subtlety and exactness makes the reader feel that he is not in a poetic emotion, but a real world. When a modern reader concentrates his mind on Frost's poems, it makes his sense conscious what the world seems to a simple man.

An Exploration of the Stratums of Delight and Wisdom in the Poetry of Robert Frost 1

Based on one single comment of Robert Frost (1874-1963) about his poetry, "A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom", the paper explores how the stratums of delight and wisdom of his poems are produced, and also it argues that because of Frost"s commonsense style and convincing portrayal of universal values and truth of common humanity, the poetry of Frost becomes the source of delight and wisdom for the readers. To explore the question or point already stated, some of the best poems of the poet, with special focus on the forms and styles used by Frost, have been taken into consideration, along with available critical approaches to the poet. Not only that, few of the earlier comments of the different school of poetry-from Aristotle to Horace onwards-have been engaged to analyze and answer the question Frost has produced by the comment about his own poems in particular and the poetry in general. This paper also focuses the fact that the delight and wisdom of Frost&q...

Emperors of Ice Cream: Sense, Non-Sense and Silliness in American Poetry

Does it matter what poems say, or only how they say it? American poetry workshops avoid such questions, focusing on whether poems "work" rather than on what they mean. But to judge by the claims American poets make in craft lectures, book blurbs and award acceptance speeches, most believe that what poems say matters quite a lot, that though, as William Carlos Williams claimed, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / … men [and presumably women] die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."