essay on achievements of robert frost
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Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1874 (1) Robert Frosts’ father, William Prescott Frost Jr., a teacher, and later on an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was of English descent, and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, was from Scottish descent (4). Frost lived In San Francisco until he was twelve, when his father died of tuberculosis. Thereafter, he, his mother, and his only sister, Jeanie, lived in the small town of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
There Frost attended Lawrence High School where he met his future wife and co-valedictorian, Elinor White (1). The young not-yet poet became interested in reading and writing poetry during his years in high school (3). Frost published his first poem in his school's magazine. After graduating, Frost went to Dartmouth long enough to get into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity (4). Frost passed the entrance exams for Harvard, but instead attended Dartmouth in 1892, because it was cheaper, but also because his grandfather blamed Harvard for the bad habits of William. Frost stayed at Dartmouth for less than a term, then left (5). This caused a fit with Elinor, she wanted him to finish college and wouldn’t marry him until he graduated college.
Frost went back to Massachusetts to teach and to work at a variety of jobs like delivering newspapers and factory labor. He hated these jobs with a passion, finally feeling his true calling as a poet (4). The poet favored Ralph Waldo Emerson, and read many of his works (6). In 1894 Robert Frost had his first poem published in The Independent, the title of his poem was “My Butterfly: an Elegy” (7). Frost proposed to Elinor, and she said no because she wanted him to finish college first, so the poet then attended Harvard Unive...
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Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. "Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet," writes James M. Cox, "it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor point out inPoems for Study, "Frost's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.
Frost's theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the nineteenth-century Romantics, he maintained that a poem is "never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness." Yet, "working out his own version of the 'impersonal' view of art," as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T. S. Eliot's idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry: "The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse.... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful."