American literature.

Name              -           Bhaliya Uma H.

Roll no:          -           01

M.A.Part-ii    -           Sem-iii

Paper             -           03, Ec-303.

Paper name   -           American literature.

Topic for assignment      -

               “Robert Frost as a Poet”

Submitted To:              Dr.Dilipsir Barad

                                     Department of English.

                                     Bhavnagar university, 

                                     Bhavnagar.     

Ø Robert Frost (1874-1963)

He was born in San Francisco, California, the son of William Prescott frost of Scotland. He was named after Robert E.lee, the commander of the confederate armies during the American civil war (1861-1865). So he was American poet. Frost’s poetry helped provide a link between the American poetry of the 19^th century and that of the 20^th century. Frost continued to write poetry, but he was unsuccessful at publishing his work. Frost achieved his first literary success to his book of poems a boy’s will (1913). This work established frost as an author and was representative of his lifelong poetic style. His second collection, north of Boston was published in 1914 and also won praise, he met many other American poets in England but he influence of the Georgian poets.

Ø Robert frost poetical work

In Robert frost poetry mainly reflects life in rural New England. His poetry is concerned with now people interact with their environment he saw the beauty of nature. He often wrote in the standard meter of blank verse. ‘Fire and ice’ and ‘stopping by woods on a showy evening’ is frost’s best known poem. In the title poem of New Hampshire, frost makes an explicit statement about his beliefs. He wrote two plays in blank verse. The first, a masque of reason (1945), received lukewarm praise from critics. The second, a masque of mercy (1947), which is a modern treatment of Christian biblical figures, was more successful.

Ø Robert frost as a poet

Robert frost is a great American poet of the 20^th century. He has been called “the voice of America”. He is honors than any other American poet of the century. He has won world-wide fame and recognition and has already established himself as a ‘classic’.

·        His simplicity

His poetry is very simply. He writes of the simplest subjects, and he says what he has to say in the most lucid and simple manner. Simplicity of his poem has endeared him to ordinary readers. Randall Jarrell says that a careful reading of his poem reveals that he is extraordinarily subtle, within layers of meaning. He use symbol for convey truths and that why he is modern poet as Eliot, Yeats.

“He writes of simple subject in a simple conversational style and so has endeared himself to the masses: but the learned few also find him such food for thought and so respect him and admire him. His poetry appeals to all classes of people. For one reason or the other”. A skillful combination of an outer lightness with an inner gravity is one of his major poetic achievements.

·        Robert frost as a poet of nature

Hear the question that frost is a great nature-poet or not. Who do not regard him as a nature -poet. But as a poet of country life he himself has said that this view. He said in a television interview in 1952.

“I guess I am not a nature-poet, I have written only two poems without being in them”.

Frost is a great lover of nature and his love too like that of wordsworth hills and dales, rivers and forests, trees, flowers and plants, animals, birds and insects, season and seasonal changes of his particular region, which have been described in one poem after another.

Frost’s love of nature is more comprehensive that of Wordsworth.  Wordsworth loved to paint only the spring-time beauty of nature. When Coleridge called “nature in the grove”. But while frost has an equally keen eye for the sensuoys and the beautiful in nature. Frost’s attitude or philosophy of nature it is quite different from that of Wordsworth and the other English romantic poets.

He writes of the natural scenes and sights, flora and fauna, hills and deals of the region which lies north of Boston. His love of nature is limited to nature in a particular district. But he loves both her pleasant and unpleasant aspects. He does not shut his eye to her harshness and cruelty. His approach is realistic. W.H.Auden has pointed out that frost’s…..

“Poems on natural objects are always concerned with them not as fact for mystical mediation or starting point for fantasy, but as thing with which, and on which, man acts in the course of the daily work of gaining a livelihood”.

·        Robert frost as a poet of regional

Frost is a great regional poet. The region north of Boston forms the background to his poetry New England. He knew every part of his limited world. His characters are all new Englanders, and he has succeeded in capturing the very tone, diction, idiom, and rhythm of Yankee speech. He writes of a particular region, but from the particular he constantly rises to the universal and the general. He writes and shows that such joys, sorrows, loves and hatreds are common to all humanity. Regionalism in his hands acquires a universal appeal.

·        Robert frost as a poet of man

Robert frost has written on every subject. He is a greater poet of man. As nature as a bird singing in its sleep and as mechanistic as the revolt of a factory worker. But his central subject is humanity. His poetry lives with a particular living people. Other poets have written about people. But Robert frost’s poems are the people and also they work and walk about and converse. And also he tells their stories with the landscapes are with human figures. Frost himself once remarked that he had hardly written two poems without a human being in them. As a poet of man he confines himself to a study of the new Englanders. He writes his range and its limitations. In his poem he displays a wide variety and vividness of characters. And also their reality and actuality.

·        Alienation, isolation and loneliness

His major themes of poem is alienation, isolation and loneliness and also boundaries and barriers his ‘book of people north of Boston is full of solitaries’ who are lonely and isolated for one reason or the other, he is great poet of boundaries and barriers which divide men from men and come in the way of communication. And result is that lack of understanding and friction. Man is not only isolated from other man. But frost pictures him as also alone and solitary in an impersonal and unfeeling environment. Man foolishly tries to bridge this gap, but all his efforts in this respect are of no avail. Such efforts only make him. More conscious of his own littleness.

·        Robert frost as a poet of rural life.

The passing of time pastoral poetry in England lost its naturalness and simplicity, and become artificial and conventional. Its use of the artificial convention of the pastoral. The unhappy shepherd, the fair shepherdess, the wandering flock, the daisies and violets, the dance on the village green, the flowery wreath, and the oaten pipe, all came to be regarded as the essential part of the pastoral and were used by one poet after another, as the conventional décor of their poems. The greatness of frost as a pastoral, poet has been universally recognized. The bulk of his poetry deals with rural life. And his pastoral poetry provides the centre, the basis from which to study even that part of his poetry which is not strictly pastoral. Frost’s collected poems to form an idea of the importance of rural life in the poetry of frost.

His approach to life and its problems is same and healthy his philosophy is ripe and mature. He is a traditionalist and a classicist. His conservatism is seen in his suspicion of new ideas and innovations. His pre-occupation with country scenes and sight and with simple rural folk links him up with the romantic Georgian tradition in poetry. Though frost has left behind him a number of excellent philosophical and narrative poems. His genius was essentially lyrical. He has left behind him many are not so good. He showed very beginning a tendency and it grew upon him with the passing of time. His range of characterization is limited to rural new Englanders. It does not include complex human types such as intellectuals. He displays mid-Victorian prudery in matters of sex. His poetry does not offer us any coherent message or vision of life. He treats serious subjects in a casual lighthearted fashion. And the result is comic and ridiculous, rather than serious. Frost’s “habit of instituting downward comparisons” is a degradation of the human race. He compares man to animal and trees and finds much that is animal and vegetable in human nature.

·        Modernity of frost

Frost is a modern in his attitudes towards nature. The 19^th century poets pictured nature as benevolent and kind with a “holy plan” and emphasized the harmony, the Qneness, of man and nature. His simple occupations carried on in their primitive setting, away from the haunts of modern civilization, and the concern of modern life. A frame of reference for studying and commenting on the facts of modern life. He studies life reduced to its elemental simplicity, and this elemental life is his norm with reference to which he judges urban life and even life in general. Life as it has been in all ages and countries. This same method used by such modern poets as T.s.Eliot.

Ø Selected poems of frost’s Art

(A)    Mending wall

Mending wall is one of the Quoted poems of frost. It is a dramatic lyric or monologue. The poet is the speaker in the poem. And his neighbor. Get together every spring to repair the stone wall between their respective properties. The neighbor and old New England farmer have deep value of walls and fences. He explains his belief and his father’s saying that “Good fences make good neighbours”.The speaker is of the opposite opinion. In this poem presents the speaker’s attitude more sympathetically than the neighbor’s. He present pictures of rural life and reveal its complex nature he develops it through the conflict of two opposed points of view in this poem. As a matter of fact, the real strength and effectiveness of the poem arises from this contradiction and clash of opposites. The poem represents two opposite attitudes towards life-the one is to surrender to the natural force which draw human being together. The other side the conservatism which persists in keeping up the distinctions separating them. Both are represented by two opposite types of characters one young, progressive and the other old and conservative.

   (B)     Stopping by woods on a showy Evening

It is a great master work of frost. This poem touch the heart of Pt.Jawahar Lal Nehru. He is greatest man of the world. And a devoted servant of humanity. He written four lines that.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promise to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

In this lines is inspiration of Robert frost that to one of the greatest men of India. And remained him of the service of humanity and of people to whom he had dedicated himself. The poem is simplicity itself. In this poem the poet pause one evening along a country road to watch the show fall in the woods. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and ad he sits in his horse. Driven carriage gazing into the soft. Silent whiteness. He is tempted to stay on and allowing his mind to lose itself in the charming woods. So few poems say so much in so little. Thus, this artistry of the poet is seen in the condensation and craftsmanship of meaning in the rich texture of the lyric and use of symbolist technique.

(C)    Moving

   It is most popular poem of frost moving is a sonnet which reads like a lyric. In this poem poet has already found his mature style and the spirit of the lyric is the spirit of his later work. The poet mover is at work in a field near a wood. In this poem he wonders that what is could possibly whisper. He present the various possibilities it was saying that something about the ‘heart of the sun’ or silence of the moment. A touch of humor is here imparted. It did not speak but also it did hot want to break the silence. He says that certainly the scuthe was not whispering about, its dreams of enjoyment which would come with leisure hours, after work. It whispering about wealth. All these possible alternatives are rejected one by one for the scuthe like the poet. Has a passion for truth hard reality and love the work it is doing. Its work of laying “the swale in rows”, and moving the grass. In this poem the poet has examined the various possibilities and rejected them one after another what the scuthe was actually scuthe whispering. The scuthe was saying “the fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows”. A Laborer does not escape that hard reality. But he finds the greatest pleasure in doing his work, honestly and sincerely. In this poem birches the poet assures us that “Earth is the right place for love”, But here he tells us that it is the right place for labor too.

(d) Fire and Ice

This poem fire and Ice present best metaphysical manner of Frost. The union of fire and ice is indeed remarkable. In this poem fire symbolizing the intensity of passion or desire, is as destructive as ice. Symbolizing the cold of hatred. The linking of desire to fire and hate to ice, human of emotions are transformed into vast. Impersonal forces. The poem is very rich and great complexity of meaning in the paradoxes it reveals. The intensity of man’s passions, the very thing which makes him human, creates the inhuman forces of cataclysm. Thus, the poem “fire and Ice” present destructive powers of “the heat of love or passion and the cold of hate” the poem has nine lines. In short form pf poem frost preseht distinction between the two extremes of love and hate. Thus, in this poem forost has enriched considerably the meaning of his brief lyric.

Design In this poem poet tries to upset the romantic, complacent and optimistic view of nature as kind and benevolent. In this poem poet comes across such a plant. He finds that on the white heal all there is a white spider. The use of the words ‘dim piled’, ‘fat’- words which we generally use for children brings out the poet’s sympathy for the spider. This spider holds in its mouth a white moth, white like “a piece of rigid satin cloth”. So it is a pattern of whiteness. The white spider the white flower. And the white moth with dead wings, carried like a paper like’, complete the design or pattern. In this poem he observes this design or pattern of whitness and reflects upon it. Such this poem design is a great work of frost. And he really preseht a design alone can account for the destructive pattern in white. His famous collection. So we can says that he is as a major American poet. His poetic treatment is unique and distinctive in many ways. He always writers from his own personal experience and observation.