Page 9 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Harvard’s 1965 alumni directory shows that Robert got an honorary degree at Harvard. Robert
also received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford universities and from Bates College.
Frost was also the first person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College.
During Robert’s lifetime the main library of Amherst College and the Robert Frost Middle
School in Fairfax, Virginia were named after him.
When he was 86 years old, Robert spoke and performed a reading of his poetry at President John
F. Kennedy’s inauguration on 20th January, 1961. Around two years later, on 29 January, 1963,
th
Frost died, in Boston, of problems from prostate surgery. Buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery
in Bennington, Vermont, Frost’s epitaph reads, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Robert’s poems are commented upon in the “Anthology of Modern American Poetry”, Oxford
University Press, where it is stated that behind a sometimes charmingly familiar and rural
façade, Frost’s poetry normally presents menacing and pessimistic undertones which normally
are not analysed or recognised.
One of the unique collections of Robert materials, to which he himself contributed, is found in
Massachusetts in the Special Collections department of the Jones Library in Amherst. The
collection contains roughly twelve thousand items, including original letters and manuscript
poems, photographs, correspondence along with audio and visual recordings.

1.2 Robert Frost’s Major Works

Frost’s work is mainly related to the life and landscape of New England. Although he was a poet
of traditional verse forms and metrics who continued to be detached from the poetic fashions
and movements of his time, Robert is everything besides a minor or simply regional poet. This
writer of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes is a typically modern poet
in his adherence to language as it is truly spoken, in the psychological complications of his
portraits, and in the degree to which his work is filled with layers of irony and ambiguity.

Robert’s first professional poem, “My Butterfly,” was published in the New York newspaper The
Independent on November 8, 1894.
By the time Robert returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length
collections, North of Boston and A Boy’s Will, and his reputation as a renowned poet had
established. Frost had become the most celebrated poet in America by nineteen-twenties. With
each new work—consisting of New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple
Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—Robert’s fame and honours (along with four Pulitzer
Prizes) increased.

In a review of The Poetry of Robert Frost in 1970, the poet Daniel Hoffman defines Robert’s
early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the
sources of its own delight in the world,” and comments on Robert’s career as The American
Bard: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer
in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”

“The Road Not Taken” is Robert’s poem published in 1915 in the collection Mountain Interval.
Printed in italics, it is the first poem in the volume. Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken is
about a decisional crisis. The narrator while walking through the yellow wood comes upon a
fork in the road. He considers both paths and concludes that each path is equally appealing and
well-travelled. After selecting one of the two roads, the narrator tells himself that he will return
to this fork one day to travel on the other road. Though, he understands that it is unlikely that he
will ever get the opportunity to return to this particular point in time as his choice of path will
only result in other forks in the road and in other life changing decisions. The narrator ends on
a nostalgic note, thinking to himself how different would things be if he had chosen the other
road.

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