Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 January 29, 1963) was an American poet.

His
work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is
highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American
colloquial speech.[2] His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New
England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and
philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American
poets of the twentieth century,[3] Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime,
receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public
literary figures, almost an artistic institution." [3] He was awarded the Congressional
Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetical works.

Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. In 1885 when Frost was 11, his
father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with just eight dollars. Frost's mother died of
cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital,
where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his
mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in
1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.[10]
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (18961904, died of cholera); daughter
Lesley Frost Ballantine (18991983); son Carol (19021940, committed suicide); daughter Irma
(19031967); daughter Marjorie (19051934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth);
and daughter Elinor Bettina (died just three days after her birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma
outlived their father. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast
cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.[10]

Work
Style and critical response
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
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." He also praised "Frost's seriousness and honesty," stating that Frost
was particularly skilled at representing a wide range of human experience in his poems.[15]
Jarrell's notable and influential essays on Frost include the essays "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial'"
(1962), which consisted of an extended close reading of that particular poem, and "To The
Laodiceans" (1952) in which Jarrell defended Frost against critics who had accused Frost of
being too "traditional" and out of touch with Modern or Modernist poetry.
U.S stamp, 1974

In Frost's defense, Jarrell wrote "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry are grotesque
simplifications, distortions, falsificationscoming to know his poetry well ought to be enough,
in itself, to dispel any of them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of
talking about his work." And Jarrell's close readings of poems like "Neither Out Too Far Nor In
Too Deep" led readers and critics to perceive more of the complexities in Frost's poetry.[16][17]
In an introduction to Jarrell's book of essays, Brad Leithauser notes that, "the 'other' Frost that
Jarrell discerned behind the genial, homespun New England rusticthe 'dark' Frost who was
desperate, frightened, and bravehas become the Frost we've all learned to recognize, and the
little-known poems Jarrell singled out as central to the Frost canon are now to be found in most
anthologies." [18][19]
Jarrell lists a selection of the Frost poems he considers the most masterful, including "The Witch
of Cos," "Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," "Directive," "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too
Deep," "Provide, Provide," "Acquainted with the Night," "After Apple Picking," "Mending
Wall," "The Most of It," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "To Earthward," "Stopping by the Woods
on a Snowy Evening," "Spring Pools," "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers," "Design," [and] "Desert
Places."[20]
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 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his
verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions
as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-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
OConnor point out in Poems for Study, Frosts 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.
Frosts theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-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. Eliots 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.
To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up 19th-century tools and
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made them new. Lawrance Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, the
self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content work to a
poets advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalists burdenthe
perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself
put it in The Constant Symbol, wrote his verse regular; he never completely
abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his
contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line length,
and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that the freshness
of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to
verse as the verse in turn might be set to music. He believed, rather, that the
poems particular mood dictated or determined the poets first commitment to
metre and length of line.
Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style
by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his
language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by
employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism,
Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his endeavor to make his style approximate as
closely as possible the style of conversation. But what Frost achieved in his poetry
was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom.
He wanted to restore to literature the sentence sounds that underlie the words,
the vocal gesture that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poets ear must be
sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of
sound in the spoken word. The Death of the Hired Man, for instance, consists
almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and Warren, her farmer-husband, but
critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of their
speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound The Death of the Hired Man
represented Frost at his bestwhen he dared to write ... in the natural speech of
New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the natural
speech of the newspapers, and of many professors.
Frosts use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed
regionalism. Within New England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire, which
he called one of the two best states in the Union, the other being Vermont. In an
essay entitled Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation, W. G. ODonnell
noted how from the start, in A Boys Will, Frost had already decided to give his
writing a local habitation and a New England name, to root his art in the soil that he
had worked with his own hands. Reviewing North of Boston in the New Republic,
Amy Lowell wrote, Not only is his work New England in subject, it is so in
technique.... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness
which is extraordinary. Many other critics have lauded Frosts ability to realistically
evoke the New England landscape; they point out that one can visualize an orchard
in After Apple-Picking or imagine spring in a farmyard in Two Tramps in Mud
Time. In this ability to portray the local truth in nature, ODonnell claims, Frost
has no peer. The same ability prompted Pound to declare, I know more of farm life
than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of Life.
Frosts regionalism, critics remark, is in his realism, not in politics; he creates no
picture of regional unity or sense of community. In The Continuity of American
Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce describes Frosts protagonists as individuals who are
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constantly forced to confront their individualism as such and to reject the modern
world in order to retain their identity. Frosts use of nature is not only similar but
closely tied to this regionalism. He stays as clear of religion and mysticism as he
does of politics. What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to
the earths fertility and to mans relationship to the soil. To critic M. L. Rosenthal,
Frosts pastoral quality, his lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and
natural, is the staple of his reputation.
Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one man and another, so he is
also always aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and man.
Marion Montgomery has explained, His attitude toward nature is one of armed and
amicable truce and mutual respect interspersed with crossings of the boundaries
between individual man and natural forces. Below the surface of Frosts poems are
dreadful implications, what Rosenthal calls his shocked sense of the helpless
cruelty of things. This natural cruelty is at work in Design and in Once by the
Pacific. The ominous tone of these two poems prompted Rosenthals further
comment: At his most powerful Frost is as staggered by the horror as Eliot and
approaches the hysterical edge of sensibility in a comparable way.... His is still the
modern mind in search of its own meaning.
The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frosts poems is
modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be
alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the
natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in
the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen,
the tangible and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this Frosts ability to
find the ordinary a matrix for the extraordinary. In this respect, he is often
compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a
simple fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater
mystery or significance. The poem Birches is an example: it contains the image of
slender trees bent to the ground temporarily by a boys 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 childs play and natural phenomena, but also
with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge.
Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frosts poems, and in
Education by Poetry he explained: Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty
metaphors, grace metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we
have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning
another.... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your
proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me
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The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
-Robert Frost
As in many of Frosts poems the spectre of Death is never far off and this poem seems no
different. At the first level of meaning is a crow shaking snow from a tree on top of the speaker,
an event that changes his mood.
Part of understanding poetry comes from asking the text questions, such as: how does snow
falling on someone change his mood? Why dust of snow, an image important enough to be used
as the title? Is the type of tree significant? Is the type of bird significant?
Often to ask the question brings ready answers. Wintry settings are often pictures of Death.
Perhaps the dust of snow invokes the dust to dust-ness of life. Crows are often harbingers of
death. And while a hemlock tree isnt poisonous, the very mentioning of hemlock is enough to
bring up ominous overtones. But the chief question remains, how does a light fall of snow
change the speakers mood?
We could answer that the levity of the situation is enough to lighten his mood. Or perhaps so
many symbols of death have reminded him that life is short. But theres more to notice here. In
the latter half of the poem we have a gift, a change of heart, and the salvation at the end of the
day. Of course, being covered with snow is itself often used as a symbol of forgiveness (matched
with the repentance in line six), perhaps too snow falling has some baptismal element. These
details indicate a deeper change of heart than a simple carpe diem dictum.
There are still two critical details that we havent discussed. The first is just a little trinket of a
word that is the thread that will unravel this poem for us. It is the final word, rued, meaning to
suffer, to loathe, to grieve. It comes from the old English word meaning sorrow and repentance.
But not only that, it does double duty, it is also a pun for rood, a cross or crucifix.
The final critical detail is how the heart is changed. It is not the crow that gives the new heart, it
is not the snow that gives the new heart, it is the way the crow shakes down the snow that
changes the speakers heart. The question then is: what is that way a crow shakes snow from a
tree? It is here that a knowledge of the rest of Frosts poetry serves us well. Frost is a walker, a
vigorous, relentless walker of the woods, and often his poems are in that very setting. Even apart
from that it makes sense to see that while the man in the poem is walking, he is ruing the day.
There is some turmoil or disdain that he carries with him as he walks the woods. Coming around
a tree he startles -above him- a crow, which, squawking loudly no doubt, causes the bird to leap
from his perch and fly away, thus sending down a light sprinkling of snow. This is the way a
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crow shakes down snow. The change of heart comes from both seeing the crow fleeing and the
act of flying, the ascension itself.
This epiphany is echoed in its meter. Written primarily in iambic di-meter, there are three lines
that break the pattern, lines four, five, and eight. The appearance of the hemlock tree calls for an
anapestic interruption: from a HEMlock TREE. This ramps up the energy of the line causing it
to spill across the stanza into the next line: has GIV -en my HEART. These two lines, anapest
iamb// iamb anapest, emulate the change of heart, the increased heartbeat of the surprise gift. It is
a cacophony, followed by the cadence of the sixth and seventh lines, which return to iambic
dimeter. But the final line reminds us of the transformation with a rambunctious anapest -of a
DAY-, a little skip at the end that reveals reality is forever changed.
Suddenly our apparition of death loses its strength; it flies away in fear. It is this flight, Death
itself running away, this method, that changes his heart; it is ascension, a glimpse of resurrection,
that drives off death; it is the gift, the baptismal rain, that has brought salvation. On a day both
rued and rood-ed, the crux of joy and sorrow, comes an unexpected gift, the day of death from
which flows all life. Even a man of such tattered faith as Robert Frost knew that on the heels of
death, in the very dust, beneath the cawing carrion bird, resurrection rises.
Dust of Snow was published in the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of poetry New Hampshire.
Frost uses a conventional ABAB rhyme scheme and omits adjectives or adverbs in the poem.
This style elucidates the simplicity of the everyday occurrence: a crow taking flight from a tree
branch; but, most importantly, Frost shows how such an innocuous action has gravity for the
narrator, giving him a change of mood. Frosts uncanny ability to elicit deep-meaning with
colloquial and basic language is in full display in this poem.
There is one word that Frost uses that pervades a certain meaning throughout the rest of the
poem: hemlock. We associate hemlock poison with death, specifically the Socratess proverbial
willful death. In the Phaedo, Socrates claims philosophy (the pursuit of wisdom) is ultimately a
preparation for death. It is this recognition of death that inspires the narrator to have a change of
heart: once he realizes he is condemned to death, his day takes on a whole new meaning.
Moreover, the crow is a dark bird and a symbol for death, as well as the dust imageryto dust
we shall return. The narrators awareness of his coming death reignites a passion within his
narrators heart, and saves his day from the indifference he possessed before. He is reminded
that he should seize the day, since he only has so many.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

On a dark winter evening, the narrator stops his sleigh to watch the snow falling in the woods. At
first he worries that the owner of the property will be upset by his presence, but then he
remembers that the owner lives in town, and he is free to enjoy the beauty of the falling snow.
The sleigh horse is confused by his masters behavior stopping far away from any farmhouse
and shakes his harness bells in impatience. After a few more moments, the narrator reluctantly
continues on his way.
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Analysis
In terms of text, this poem is remarkably simple: in sixteen lines, there is not a single threesyllable word and only sixteen two-syllable words. In terms of rhythmic scheme and form,
however, the poem is surprisingly complex. The poem is made up of four stanzas, each with four
stressed syllables in iambic meter. Within an individual stanza, the first, second, and fourth lines
rhyme (for example, know, though, and snow of the first stanza), while the third line
rhymes with the first, second, and fourth lines of the following stanza (for example, here of the
first stanza rhymes with queer, near, and year of the second stanza).
One of Frosts most famous works, this poem is often touted as an example of his life work. As
such, the poem is often analyzed to the minutest detail, far beyond what Frost himself intended
for the short and simple piece. In reference to analyses of the work, Frost once said that he was
annoyed by those pressing it for more than it should be pressed for. It means enough without its
being pressedI dont say that somebody shouldnt press it, but I dont want to be there.
The poem was inspired by a particularly difficult winter in New Hampshire when Frost was
returning home after an unsuccessful trip at the market. Realizing that he did not have enough to
buy Christmas presents for his children, Frost was overwhelmed with depression and stopped his
horse at a bend in the road in order to cry. After a few minutes, the horse shook the bells on its
harness, and Frost was cheered enough to continue home.
The narrator in the poem does not seem to suffer from the same financial and emotional burdens
as Frost did, but there is still an overwhelming sense of the narrators unavoidable
responsibilities. He would prefer to watch the snow falling in the woods, even with his horses
impatience, but he has promises to keep, obligations that he cannot ignore even if he wants to.
It is unclear what these specific obligations are, but Frost does suggest that the narrator is
particularly attracted to the woods because there is not a farmhouse near. He is able to enjoy
complete isolation.
Frosts decision to repeat the final line could be read in several ways. On one hand, it reiterates
the idea that the narrator has responsibilities that he is reluctant to fulfill. The repetition serves as
a reminder, even a mantra, to the narrator, as if he would ultimately decide to stay in the woods
unless he forces himself to remember his responsibilities. On the other hand, the repeated line
could be a signal that the narrator is slowly falling asleep. Within this interpretation, the poem
could end with the narrators death, perhaps as a result of hypothermia from staying in the frozen
woods for too long.
The narrators promises to keep can also be seen as a reference to traditional American duties
for a farmer in New England. In a time and a place where hard work is valued above all things,
the act of watching snow fall in the woods may be viewed as a particularly trivial indulgence.
Even the narrator is aware that his behavior is not appropriate: he projects his insecurities onto
his horse by admitting that even a work animal would think it queer.

Another contributor to the Cambridge Companion offers up what is probably the most
representative interpretation of the poem (if one accepts that the poem should be interpreted).
John Cunningham writes:
The opposition between humanity (the owner of the woods whose house is in the village and
who will not see the speaker, the absence of a farmhouse near) and the purposeless natural
phenomena (descending snow and night, the woods, the frozen lake) Frost establishes early.
Even the horse must think it queer. Three times the poet uses some form of stop. The setting is
becoming blank, undifferentiated whiteness, a desert place on the darkest evening of the year,
literally an overstatement but metaphorically not so to the speaker. For him movement forward
ceases; his choice is between the woods and frozen lake, either offering only death to one who
stops. In effect the horse asks if there is some mistake. To have so stopped could well prove to
be such. The sweep/ of easy wind, free of the thousand mortal shocks that one is heir to, and
the downy flake, like warm bedding, entice the speaker to give up his human errands and to
sleep in the void of death. The woods are dark and deep, not promising words in Frost, deep
as the final absence of death, and lovely only in the temptation to shuffle off that they offer.
With but I have promises to keep, the speaker and the poem pivot, rejecting the temptation,
affirming his promises, a word with human connotations of duty and presence, and accepting the
miles [that he must] go before he sleeps this might and before he sleep[s] finally in death.
[pp. 269-270]
Cunningham then goes on to interpret the repetition of the last two lines as congruent with the
stacked-up accents at the pivot above Quoi? This gets opaque. Do you get it? I dont.
However, if hes going to run with this interpretation (which, as I wrote before, is the standard
interpretation) I think he misses a golden, interpretive opportunity in the last two lines.
One could interpret the last two lines as follows:
And miles to go before I sleep
[I have miles to go before I'm home and in bed.]
And then, much more darkly and deeply he writes:
And miles to go before I sleep
[And many more "miles" to go before I go to die.]

Poem Summary
The speaker in the poem is traveling at night through the snow and pauses with his horse near the
woods by a neighbor's house to watch the snow falling around him. His horse shakes his harness
bells, questioning the pause; perhaps this place isn't on their usual route, or he is curious that
there doesn't appear to be a farmhouse nearby.
The speaker continues to stand near the woods, attracted by the deep, dark silence of his
surroundings. He feels compelled to move further into the snowy woods, but he ultimately
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decides to continue, concluding with perhaps the most famous lines of the poem: 'But I have
promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep'.

Robert Frost, American Poet, 1874 to 1963

Theme and Analysis

Serene Interpretation
Like many of Frost's poems, 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' deals with the
contemplation of nature. Many readers debate about whether or not the tone of the poem is
calm and serene, or dark and depressing. On the one hand, the speaker wants to take a moment to
pause in a quiet spot to watch the snow falling, perhaps to soothe his mind and contemplate
nature. The pull of the woods could just be the solitude of being alone and the lure of being free
of responsibilities.
It might also suggest a sense of adventure and attraction to danger--the 'darkness' and 'depth' of
the woods. Perhaps the speaker wants to experience new things and places, but his
responsibilities--his work, his family, his community--keep him from going off on dark and
dangerous adventures. A simple interpretation is that work must come before play, which the
little horse reminds us with the shaking of his bells, as if to say: we have places to go. We can't
just stand around and watch the snow falling. There's work to be done.

Dark Interpretation
A darker interpretation of the poem addresses exhaustion with life and a longing for death. The
speaker tells us that it's 'the darkest evening of the year,' and the darkness, the isolated spot, and
the cold, frozen lake don't sound like a very inviting place to stop and commune with one's own
thoughts (ll. 7-8). The season of winter in literature is typically associated with death and
darkness; animals hibernate, plants die, and it will be a long time before the earth wakes up
again.