PowerPoint Presentation

							Robert Frost
 1874-1963
             Robert Frost
•   Biography
•   Frost on Poetry
•   Reception
•   Texts
•   Regional Poetry
               Frost on Poetry

—the ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only
 true reader.
Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you've had
your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not
safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative
values: you don't know the metaphor in its strength and
weakness. You don't know how far you can expect to ride
it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe
in science; you are not safe in history.
                                     —“Education for Poetry”
What I like about Bergson and Fabre is that they have
bothered our evolutionism so much with the cases of
instinct they have brought up. You get more credit for
thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in
easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying
things that suggest formulae but won't formulate--that
almost but don't quite formulate. I should like to be so
subtle at this game as to seem to a casual person altogether
obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant
nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he
was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes.
Well well well.
                                     —Letter to Louis Untermeyer
Writing free verse is like playing tennis
with the net down.
                               —Robert Frost
             Reception
At the same time, [the book] is extraordinarily free from a
young man’s extravagances; there is no insistent obtrusion of
self-strain after super-things. Neither does it belong to any
modern ‘school,’ nor go in harness to any new and twisted
theory of art. It is so simple, lucid, and experimental that,
reading a poem, one can see clearly with the poet’s own swift
eye, and follow the trail of his glancing thought. One feels that
this man has seen and felt; seen with a revelatory, a creative
vision; felt personally and intensely; and he simply writes
down, without confusion or affectation, the results thereof.
Rarely today is it our fortune to fall in with a new poet
expressing himself in so pure a vein.
                                            —The Academy, 1913
The language ranges from a never vulgar
colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and
intense simplicity. There are moments when the
plain language and lack of violence make the
unaffected verses look like prose, except that the
sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true
in rhythm to the emotion.
                            —Edward Thomas, 1914
Mr. Frost is an honest writer, writing from
himself, from his own knowledge and emotion;
not simply picking up the manner which
magazines are accepting at the moment, and
applying it to topics in vogue. He is quite
consciously and effortlessly putting New England
rural life into verse. He is not using themes that
anybody could have cribbed out of Ovid.
                               —Ezra Pound, 1914
         Randall Jarrell, 1953
Besides the Frost that everybody knows there is one whom no one even
talks about. Everybody knows what the regular Frost is: the one living
poet who has written good poems that ordinary readers like without any
trouble and understand without any trouble; the conservative editorialist
and self-made apothegm-joiner, full of dry wisdom and free, complacent,
Yankee enterprise; the Farmer-Poet--this is an imposing private role
perfected for public use, a sort of Olympian Will Rogers out of
Tanglewood Tales; and, last or first of all, Frost is the standing, speaking
reproach to any orther good modern poet: 'If Frost can write poetry that's
just as easy as Longfellow you can too--you do too.' It is this 'easy' side of
Frost that is most attractive to academic readers, who are eager to canonize
any modern poet who condemns in example the modern poetry which they
condemn in precept; and it is this side that has helped get him neglected or
depreciated by intellectuals--the reader of Eliot or Auden usually dismisses
Frost as something inconsequentially good that he knew all about long
ago.
     Randall Jarrell, 1953
So far from being obvious, optimistic,
orthodox, many of these poems are
extraordinarily subtle and strange.
         Lionel Trilling, 1959
For a long time I was alienated from Frost’s great canon of
work by what I saw in it, that either itself seemed to
denigrate the work of the critical intellect or that gave its
admirers the ground for making the denigration.

I have to say that my Frost is not the Frost I seem to
perceive existing in the minds of so many of his admirers.
He is not the Frost who confounds the characteristically
modern practice of poetry by his notable democratic
simplicity of utterance: on the contrary. He is not the Frost
who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues,
simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling: anything but.
    J. Donald Adams, 1959
Professor Trilling confessed that he thinks of
Frost as a 'terrifying' poet, and that 'the
universe he conceives is a terrifying universe.'
Holy mackerel! Frost simply sees the universe
as it is and accepts it. He isn't terrified by what
he sees, and neither should we be. He takes it
in his stride, which is one reason why he is in
there pitching at 85.
        T. M. Guerin, 1959
I hope Robert Frost was having a nice plate
of buckwheat cakes and Vermont maple
syrup as he read Mr. Adams' remarks. He
couldn't have done better unless he had
taken the so-called professor out to the
woodshed.
       Emory Neff, 1959

Frost might have had a Novel prize if so
many New York critics hadn't gone whoring
after European gods.
             “Mending Wall”
    Something there is that doesn’t love
                  a wall
•   There is something that doesn't love a wall
•   Something doesn't love a wall
•   Something hates a wall
•   X hates a wall
•   A wall is hated by X
         Movement
Rumination 1-11
The actual activity 12-27
“Spring is the mischief in me” 28-38
“I see him there” 38-45
                  A Famous Title
      Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet
•   “a biography of Frost”
•   “a study of U.S. race relations”
•   “at least one work of feminist scholarship”
•    “a study of U.S. social conditions”
•   “an essay that excoriates American literary theorists for not going
    the way of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci”
•   “a proposal for alternatives to prison for nonviolent felons”
•   “a biography of an eighteenth-century Jesuit”
•   “a self-help text which occupied the New York Times best-seller list
    for over seven years”
•   “an analysis of a crisis in highway repairs and maintenance in
    Connecticut”