One of my favourite poets is Robert Frost. His writing is just such a revelation! I first heard of him through one of favourite books - 'The Outsiders' by S.E. Hinton(okay, pretty cheesy but come on!) and from there I started reaing his other material.

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

Robert Frost was a relatively unknown poet for about half of his life, living between the USA and England. He was a popular modern American poet of the 20th century who based a lot of his poems on rural New England, and nature itself which he surrounded himself with a lot of his life. His difficult life, and the times he grew up and lived in, affected his poems deeply, and a lot of them have layers of meaning and hidden truths in them. Robert Frost was unarguably one of America’s leading poets of the 20th century, winning an unbeaten four Pulitzer prizes throughout his career. A lot of Frost’s poems are based on nature and everyday surroundings, and it is clear he got a lot of inspiration from living on his farm, in Derry New Hampshire, and nature in England. Poems such as ‘The Road not Taken’, ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘Birches’ have all become famous poems, and his most glorifying moment was most possibly his recitation of his poem ‘The Gift Outright’ at J. F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration in 1961. He was a figure of the 20th century whose poems differed from other poets. His poems were considered ‘not as modern’ as his other contemporaries and many had metaphors to do with nature, extinction and death, and many were based on experience in his life. His writing style was just the start of the modern era of poetry, where the key elements in it were experimental and individual. People also became more open to different poetic conventions, as his poems gained more and more recognition.

Robert Frost was born on March 26th, 1874 in San Francisco. His father died in 1885, when he was eleven. After that, he and his family went to live with relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He soon graduated from high school and married Elinor White, a high school friend, the year after he sold “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to the Independent – a New York literary journal in 1895. In the same year they married, their first son Elliot was born. A year after, Frost attended Harvard University, where he did well, but didn’t end up with a degree after the pressures of Elliot and another child on the way became too great. After hearing the warnings of tuberculosis the family moved to Methuen in Massachusetts in 1900, where they rented a farm and raised poultry. Soon after the move, Elliot died in 1900 of cholera, in July. Frost is then said to have been angry at him, for not getting a doctor in time, and believed god was punishing him and taken his child away. This was one of the significant factors in Robert Frost’s life that made his poems so unlike others. The death of their first son, and Frost’s other losses later in life, helped him create many poems such as ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’ which is about loss and the cycle of life. They had a fourteen month old now to care for, called Lesley and they had to look after her. After the landlord of the property forced them to leave, with the help of Frost’s grandfather, he bought a property in Derry, New Hampshire where they lived for 10 years.

While Frost was living in Derry, it is said he wrote some of his most creative and well known poems. Between writing he raised a family and had three more children, while another born in 1907 died in infancy as well. He also maintained the farm, and living in a rural and isolated place, gave him the inspiration to write. This is possibly why a lot of his poems reflect nature and isolation – because of the place he lived in. He was writing modern works, and a lot were traditional poems. In 1911, the big decision came where Robert and Elinor decided to sell the farm for money and make a fresh start in London where he hoped to gain recognition for some of his poems, where America didn’t accept his innovative and experimental writing style. Robert Frost was already nearly forty, but still hadn’t published a book of poems. He was getting discouraged, as poetry was considered as a career for young people. This decision proved successful, as almost after they moved to London, Robert published ‘A Boy’s will’ in 1913.

The decision and the many other decisions in his life helped Frost to write one his most famous poems ‘The Road not taken’. Through his experiences and life so far, he wrote this poem to reflect his regret at how he only travelled one path, and how people have to make so many choices that affect their future later on. The Road Not Taken can be interpreted as being a few meanings. Most people often misinterpret it for saying travelling on the road with ‘less wear’ will make all the difference in their life and assume it’s a good thing. The poem can actually be seen that he has to make a choice from two equally ‘leafy’ paths and must choose one. It reflects the fact that the choices in people’s lives affect them and their future and that they can’t go back and go on the ‘other path’. The Road not Taken has feelings of regret that he couldn’t take the other path and see what it would have been like.

The Road not Taken was first published in 1915, shortly after he moved back to America. The poem probably reflects a lot of hard decisions he made – such as the one to move to England in the first place, and he decision to move back to America. He and his wife were short of money, and his financial need help him make the decision of going back to America. There he spent most of his life in New England, on a farm on New Hampshire. The literal metaphor he uses with the nature of trees and the forks that are in the wood, with the everyday choices people have to make in their lives, signify the importance of nature and human emotions in real life. Robert Frost’s poems almost always have something to do with nature, and the environment such as the one he lived in most – New England. An example of a poem of this nature would be ‘Nothing Gold can stay’.

‘Nothing Gold can stay’ is a poem that was written in 1923, when he had moved back from England to his farm he bought in New Hampshire. It is a poem about the cycle of life, and how nothing lasts forever. It reflects the mortality of man and refers to the bible, and the Garden of Eden, which means the fall of man. It is a poem written probably about children who died at infancy, his dead parents, and his dead friend, Edward Thomas who died in World War 1. The poem can be interpreted as being one that reflects Robert Frost’s life, how everything starts off being ‘gold’, new and precious, but matures and wilts and dies. It explains the mortality and cycle of life, and how nothing stays the same forever.

After his poems became accepted in the American poetry circles, a new era of poetry began. His poems were innovative – experimental with the different rhythm and meter and Frost is often referred to as the pioneer of poetic rhythm. As early modern poetry was not widely accepted, that may be why Frost’s poems were published so late. Before the modern era, many people had accepted the earlier poetic conventions, and that was that every poem should rhyme and that lines should contain certain syllables or end in a certain way. Frost changed this and the poems he wrote created a new era of poetry of the 20th century.

The hard life of Robert Frost can be seen reflected in a lot of his poems, such as Nothing Gold Can Stay. When his wife died in 1938, he had already lost four of his children. One of his sons also committed suicide after frustrations of being an unsuccessful poet and farmer. Frost also suffered from depression, and always held doubts about whether to continue writing. His life, already been surrounded by so many deaths, expressed his thoughts in many of his poems. Through a lot of them, they contain deep meanings and many hidden interpretations behind the surface. While in England, he was influenced by many English poets such as Rupert Brooke, and befriended other famous poets, including Ezra Pound. A lot of his poem’s verse forms are traditional, but he was often referred to as being a pioneer of poetic rhythm and the use of everyday speech in his poems, and was often experimental with the rhythm and words.

Robert Frost died in Boston on January 29th, 1963. By then he was renowned for being one of the most famous American poets of all time. Although most of his life was surrounded by death, isolation and hard decisions, he eventually made a name for himself. He is definitely a poet people will never forget, because of the hard to forget poetic lines like that in ‘Birches’ or the famous poem ‘Mending Wall’. His life can be reflected in many of his poems, and maybe that is why many of them are famous today. People were intrigued by him and the isolation and rural surroundings he chose to live in show he loved nature and helped to evolve the poetry of that day to something more meaningful.

‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’