ROBERT FROST-A CHRONOLOGY

PERSONAL FAMILY LIFE

 Date  Event3-26-74 Birth of Robert Lee Frost, San Francisco, Cal.6-25-76 Birth of Jeanie Frost (sister)5-5-1885 Death of father, Will Frost, in San Francisco. Family returns to Lawrence, Mass. for burial.Sept, 1888 Robert enters Lawrence High SchoolMay, 1890 Robert writes his first poem La Noche Triste June, 1892 Robert graduates from Lawrence High School sharing valedictorian honors with Elinor White.Sept., 1892 Enters Dartmouth. Leaves before end of term.1893 - 1894 Teaches in local schools. Works in the mills.11-8-94 First poem published: "My Butterfly: An Elegy" 1895 Works as a reporter, teaches school.12-19-95 Marries Elinor Miriam White in Lawrence.9-25-96 First child, Elliott, born to Rob and Elinor.Sept., 1897 Enters Harvard University.3-31-1899 Leaves Harvard. Returns to Lawrence.4-28-1899 Second child, daughter Lesley born.7-8-1900 First child, Elliott dies.Oct., 1900 Frost family moves to farm, Derry, N. H.11-2-1900 Frost's mother, Isabelle, dies of cancer.5-27-1902 Third child, son Carol born.6-27-1903 Fourth child, daughter Irma born.3-29-1905 Fifth child, daughter Marjorie born.6-18-1907 Sixth child, Elinor Bettina born -dies within days.11-16-1911 Sells Derry Farm. Lives in Plymouth, N. H. and teaches at N. H. State Normal School.Sept., 1912 The Frost family sails for England.10-26-1912 First book of poetry accepted by publisher.5-15-1914 Second book published2-13-1915 The Frost family returns to the U. S. Buys farm in Franconia, N. H.Oct., 1920 Moves to Shaftsbury, Vermont, buys the Stone House.Dec., 1928 Buys second farm, The Gulley in Shaftsbury.9-7-1929 Sister Jeanie, dies.5-2-1934 Daughter Marjorie dies following childbirth.3-20-1938 Wife, Elinor dies of a heart attack in Florida.Summer, 1938 Frost rents apartment in Boston.Sept., 1939 Frost buys The Homer Noble Farm, Ripton, Vt to use as a summer residence.Oct 9, 1940 Son Carol dies of suicide in Shaftsbury.Spring, 1941 Frost buys home in Cambridge, Mass1-29-1963 Frost dies in Boston. Burial in Bennington

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PUBLICATION OF WORKS

 

  Date Title of Work

April, 1913 May, 1914 Feb, 1915 April, 1915 Nov, 1916 Mar, 1923 Nov, 1923 Nov, 1928 Nov, 1930 May, 1936 Feb, 1939 April, 1942 Mar, 1945 May, 1947 Sept, 1947 April, 1949 Mar, 1962

A Boy's Will, English edition North of Boston, English edition North of Boston, American edition A Boy's Will, American edition Mountain Interval Selected Poems New Hampshire West-running Brook Collected Poems A Further Range Collected Poems A Witness Tree A Masque of Reason Steeple Bush A Masque of Mercy Complete Poems In the Clearing

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HONORS AWARDS DEGREES

High School: Co-Valedictorian &Hood Prize for

Scholastic Excellence

Phi Beta Kappa Poet: Tufts, 1915

Harvard, 1916Columbia, 1932

Tufts, 1940Harvard, 1941

College of William and Mary, 1941

Member National Institute of Arts and

Letters, 1916

Member American Academy of Arts and

Letters, 1930

Hon. Member St. Botolph Club, Boston, 1932

Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry,

Harvard 1936

Member American Philosophical Society, 1937

Board of Overseers, Harvard College,

1938

Ralph Waldo

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the

following years:

1923 New Hampshire1931 Collected

Poems1937 A Further

Range1943 A Witness Tree

Russell Loines Poetry Prize, 1931

Gold Medal for Poetry, National

Institute of Arts and Letters, 1939

Gold Medal, Poetry Society of America,

1941.

Gold Medal, Limited Editions Club, 1949

Award, Academy of American Poets,

1953

First Annual Poetry Award, Boston Arts

Festival, 1954

Medal for Distinguished

Service in the Fields of Am. Literature,

Theodore Roosevelt Society, 1954

Honorary Degrees

M. A. Amherst, 1918M. A.University of

Michigan.1922L.H.D. University of

Vermont 1923Litt. D. Middlebury

College 1924Litt. D. Yale 1924

Litt D. Bowdoin 1926Litt D. University of

New Hampshire 1930L.H.D. Wesleyan

1931Litt. D. Columbia

1932L.H.D. Williams 1932

Litt. D. Dartmouth 1933

L.H.D. St. Lawrence University, 1936

L.H.D. University of Pennsylvania 1936L.H.D. Bates, 1936

Litt D. Harvard, 1937L.H.D. University of

Colorado, 1939Litt. D. Princeton

1941Litt. D. Kenyon College, 1945LL. D. Univ of

California, 1947Litt. D. Duke, 1948Litt. D. Amherst,

1948Litt. D. Colgate, 1950

Litt. D. Marlboro 1950

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Emerson Fellow in Poetry, Harvard 1939

Associate of Adams House, Harvard

Univ. 1939.

Life appointment, Simpson Lecturer in Literature. Amherst,

1949

Consultant in Poetry in the Library of

Congress 1958-59.

Inaugural Poet for President John F. Kennedy, 1961

Poet Laureate of Vermont, 1961

Medal of Honor, New York University

1956

Gold Medal, Holland Society of New

York, 1957

Gold Medal for Distinguished

Service, Poetry Society of America,

1958

Medal for Achievements in the Arts, Signet Society,

Harvard College, 1958

Emerson-Thoreau Medal, American

Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1958

Huntington Hartford Foundation Award,

1958

Congressional Gold Medal, 1960

Edward MacDowell Medal, 1962

Congressional Medal presented by Pres.

J. F. Kennedy, 1962

Bollingen Prize in Poetry, 1963

Litt. D. Univ. of Durham, England

1951Litt. D. Univ. of

Massachusetts 1951Litt. D. Univ. of North

Carolina, 1953LL. D. Univ. of Cincinnati, 1954

LL. D., Dartmouth, 1955

Litt. D. University of Rhode Island, 1955

LL. D., Colby College, 1956

Litt. D., Oxford Univ., Cambridge Univ.,

National University, Ireland and Ohio State

University, 1957L.H.D. Miami Univ.,

1959Litt. D., Syracuse University, 1959

Litt. D., Tufts University, 1959

LL. D., University of Florida, 1960

L.H.D., Hebrew Union College, 1960LL. D. University of

Miami, 1961Litt. D., Windham

College, 1961Litt. D., Boston University, 1961

LL. D. University of Michigan, 1962

L.H.D., University of Detroit, 1962

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Photograph c. 1936 by A. Allyn Bishop, Newport, VermontGift of Elizabeth Nutter

ACADEMIC CAREER 

 Dates  School of Learning  

Spring, 1893

Spring, 1894

Spring, 1895

Spring, 1906 - June 1911   Sept, 1911 - 1912   Jan, 1917 - May 1920   Sept 1921 - 1922     Nov. 1923 - 1925   Sept. 1925   Sept. 1926 - June, 1938   1933   May, 1939 -1943     Sept, 1943 - 1949     Oct. 1949   1938 - 1962

Methuen Elementary School

Salem District School

Private School of Isabelle Moodie Frost

Pinkerton Academy

New Hampshire State Normal School   Amherst College   University of Michigan, "Poet in Residence" and "Fellow in Creative Arts"   Amherst College, Professor of English   University of Michigan, "Fellow in Letters"   Amherst College, Professor of English   Associate Fellow, Pierson College, Yale University   Harvard University, Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow in Poetry   Dartmouth College, George Ticknor Fellow in the Humanities   Amherst, Simpson Lecturer in Literature   Lecturer, Bread Loaf School of English

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and Writers' Conference

Frost in Franconia, N. H. 1915Photo Courtesy of Jones Library, Amherst

BIOGRAPHY

EARLY LIFE

Although Frost was a New Englander, he was born in San Francisco on

March 26, 1874. He was the first child of William Prescott Frost, Jr., of New

Hampshire and Isabelle Moodie of Scotland. Frost's father had graduated

Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, but he was also a heavy drinker who moved

to California to earn a living in politics and journalism. He died when Frost

was eleven, and Frost's mother moved him and his sister (born in June of

1876) to New England, working as a schoolteacher in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

By the time Frost was sixteen, he had decided to be a poet. When he graduated from

Lawrence High School in 1892, he was class poet and co-valedictorian with Elinor White, the

woman who would later become his wife. After high school, Frost enrolled at Dartmouth

College, while Elinor attended St. Lawrence.

ADULT YEARS

In 1894, the New York Independent accepted his poem, "My

Butterfly," for publication. Frost was elated; not only had he received a

payment of $15, but he was now convinced that he could support himself by

writing.

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After Elinor graduated in 1895, she took a teaching position at the school Frost's

mother had started and shortly afterwards married Frost. Frost at the time worked as a teacher

and reporter, publishing what little poetry could get past the stodgily Victorian editors who

ruled the world of American letters. In December, 1895, he married Elinor, and in 1896 their

first child, Elliot, was born. He began attending Harvard, but left after eighteen months when

his second child, Lesley, was born in 1899. The following year Elliot died; the tragedy

became the catalyst for the poem entitled "Home Burial" (published in North of Boston,

1914).

Because he realized the stress that their son's death had placed on the Frosts' already

tense marriage, Frost's grandfather bought a farm in Derby, New Hampshire, and allowed the

couple and their family to live on it. They lived on the farm from 1900 to 1909; these years

were intensely creative ones for Frost. By 1907, Frost had six children and still no steady

form of income beyond the annuity.

In 1912 Frost took his family to England, where he could "write and be poor without further

scandal in the family."

The Frost children at Plymouth, New Hampshire1911. (Lesley, Carol, Marjorie, Irma)Family photos courtesy of Lesley Lee Francis

Within two months of his arrival in England, Frost placed his first book of poems, A

Boy's Will (1913) with a small London publisher, David Nutt. He also made acquaintances in

the literary world, such as the poet F. S. Flint, who introduced him to Ezra Pound, who in turn

reviewed both A Boy's Will and North of Boston, which followed it the next year. He became

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Robert and Elinor Frost at Plymouth, New Hampshire, 1911

friends with members of the Georgian school of poets--particularly with Wilfred Gibson and

Lascelles Abercrombie--and in 1914, on their urgings, he moved to Gloucestershire to be

nearer them and to experience English country living.

The most important friend he made in England was Edward Thomas, whom Frost

encouraged to write poetry and who wrote sharply intelligent reviews of Frost's first two

books. While many reviewers were content to speak of the American poet's 'simplicity' and

artlessness, Thomas recognized the originality and success of Frost's experiments with the

cadences of vernacular speech--with what Frost called 'the sound of sense'. His best early

poems, such as 'Mowin,' ‘Mending Wall,' and ‘Home Burial,' were composed under the

assumption that, in Frost's formulation from one of his letters, 'the ear does it. The ear is the

only true writer and the only true reader.’ The best part of a poet's work, he insisted, was to be

found in the sentence-sounds poems made, as of people talking. Like Wordsworth (as Edward

Thomas pointed out in one of his reviews of North of Boston), Frost boldly employed

'ordinary' words and cadences ('I have sunk to a diction even Wordsworth kept above', he said

in another letter) yet contrived to throw over them--in Wordsworth's formulation from his

preface to the Lyrical Ballads--'a certain colouring of imagination'.

England's entry into the First World War hastened Frost's return to America early in

1915. By the time he landed in New York City, his American publisher, Henry Holt, had

brought out North of Boston (Holt would continue to publish Frost throughout his life). He

was fêted by editors and critics in the literary worlds of both New York and Boston, and he

continued shrewdly to publicize himself, providing anthologists and interviewers with a

vocabulary to describe his poetic aims.

A third volume of verse, Mountain Interval, published in 1916 but still drawing on

poems he had written in England and before, showed no falling off from his previous

standard. In fact such poems as 'The Road Not Taken,’ ‘An Old Man's Winter Night,' 'The

Oven Bird,’ ‘Birches,’ ‘Putting in the Seed,' and 'Out, Out—‘ were among the best he had

written or was to write. Like the somewhat late-coming and even drab oven bird of his poem,

Frost knew in 'singing not to sing,’ and a century after the ecstatic flights of romantic poets

like Keats and Shelley, Frost's bird remained earthbound (the oven bird, in fact, builds its

nests on the ground) and, like the poet who created him, sang about the things of this world.

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Soon after he re-established himself in America, Frost purchased a farm in Franconia,

New Hampshire (he would purchase a number of farms over the course of his life) and then,

at the behest of President Alexander Meiklejohn, joined the faculty of Amherst College in

Massachusetts. Frost was later to teach at the University of Michigan and at Dartmouth

College, but his relationship to Amherst (sometimes a troubled one) was the most significant

educational alliance he formed. Meanwhile he had begun the practice of reading his poems

aloud-- rather, 'saying’ them, as he liked to put it public gatherings. These occasions, which

continued throughout his life, were often intensive ones in which he would read, comment on,

and reflect largely about his poems and about the world in general. Particularly at colleges

and universities he commanded the ears and often hearts of generations of students, and he

received so many honorary degrees from the academy that he eventually had the hoods made

into a quilt.

Frost won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes in 1924 for his fourth book, New

Hampshire, and followed it with West-Running Brook (1928) and A Further Range (1936),

which also won a Pulitzer. Yet the latter volume occasioned, from critics on the left, the first

really harsh criticism Frost's poetry had received. One of those critics, Rolfe Humphries,

complained in New Masses (his review was titled 'A Further Shrinking') that Frost no longer

showed either a dramatic or a sympathetic attitude toward his New England characters; that in

setting himself against systematic political and social reforms (especially, Franklin

Roosevelt's New Deal), he had become querulous and sarcastic, all too personally present in

his quarrel with the way things were going. It is true that, for one reason or another, Frost no

longer wrote poems like the dramatic monologues and dialogues in North Of Boston, and that

poems from A Further Range, such as 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' or 'Provide, Provide', were

argumentative and at times didactic in their thrust. But he had become expert at composing

poems that had affinities with light verse and that consisted of a pointed, witty treatment of

issues and ideas. Such a treatment purchased its surface brilliance at the cost of deeper

sympathies and explorations.Those deeper concerns were to make themselves felt once again,

however, in what was to be Frost's last truly significant book of verse, A Witness Tree (1942).

During the 1930s, as he became ever more honoured and revered, Frost endured a

terrible series of family disasters. In 1934 his youngest and best-loved child, Marjorie, died a

slow death from the puerperal fever contracted after giving birth to her first child; in 1938 his

wife Elinor died suddenly of a heart attack, then, when he seemed to be pulling things

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together once more, his son Carol committed suicide in 1940. Another daughter, Irma,

suffered--as did Frost's sister Jeannie--from mental disorders and was finally institutionalized.

A number of poems in A Witness Tree undoubtedly derived their dark tone from the family

tragedies suffered over the decade; but at any rate lyrics such as 'The Silken Tent', 'I Could

Give All to Time', 'Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same', and 'The Most of It' stand

in the top rank of Frost's work (he himself thought that some of his best poetry was contained

in this book). In words from his prose essay 'The Figure a Poem Makes', they exhibit both

‘how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.’

Except for the publishing of a major poem, 'Directive', in his 1947 volume, Steeple

Bush, Frost's poetry after the Second World War was mainly occasional, a relaxation from

earlier intensities. He made a triumphant return to England in 1957 to receive honorary

degrees from Oxford and Cambridge; he expended his efforts to have Pound released from St

Elizabeth's Hospital; and under the Kennedy administration he made a somewhat less-than-

satisfactory visit to Russia, in which he attempted, in conversation with Premier Khrushchev,

to mediate between the superpowers. His last reading was given to a large audience in Boston

in December 1962; the following day he went into hospital for a prostate operation and

suffered a severe heart attack while convalescing, then a series of embolisms, one of which

killed him in January of 1963.

Just nine months after Frost’s death, Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College,

singing Frosts’ praises and speaking on the importance of the Arts in America. Later he said;

“The death of Robert Frost leaves a vacancy in the American spirit....His death impoverishes

us all; but he has bequeathed his Nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans

will forever gain joy and understanding.”

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‘Safe!, Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see, Into the

future. Let what will be, be.’ (“Acceptance”) He lies buried in the family plot in the Old

Bennington Cemetery behind the Old First Congregational Church near Shaftsbury, Vermont.

His gravestone reads ‘I Had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World’.

ROBERT FROST READS POEM AT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY'S

INAUGURATION

JANUARY 20, 1961

On January 20, 1961 Americans watching television, listening to the radio, or standing

on the Capitol grounds heard these famous words: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not

what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens

of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the

freedom of man." So said John F. Kennedy when he was sworn in as 35th president of the

United States.

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After the applause, Kennedy welcomed to the podium one of America's great poets,

fellow New Englander Robert Frost. Frost had written a poem for the occasion called

"Dedication." Like many others he conceived the new president as young Lochinvar, the

perfect combination of spirit and flesh, passion and toughness, poetry and reality.

He approached the microphone, but blinded by the sun's glare on the snow-covered

Capitol grounds, he was unable to read it. Thinking quickly, he fell back on an old one he

knew perfectly, and in the most splendidly commanding of voices, recited it impeccably: "The

Gift Outright," a poem he had written in 1942.

THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF “DEDICATION”

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THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF “THE GIFT OUTRIGHT”

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~ The Gift Outright ~

The land was ours before we were the land's.She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was oursIn Massachusetts, in Virginia.

But we were England's, still colonials,Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,Possessed by what we now no more possessed.Something we were withholding made us weak.

Until we found out that it was ourselvesWe were withholding from our land of living,And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)To the land vaguely realizing westward,But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

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NEWS ABOUT HIS LOST POEM

Student finds Frost poem lost for 88 years

“This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday September 29 2006 on p19 of the

International news section. It was last updated at 09:26 on September 29 2006.

A poem by Robert Frost that has lain unpublished and forgotten for 88 years has been

rediscovered by a student in Virgina. The poem, War Thoughts at Home, casts light on the

development of Frost's first world war poetry. It was written in 1918, shortly after his good

friend, Edward Thomas, died in the trenches of France.”

Robert Stilling, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, was browsing

through correspondence relating to Frost in the university library when he came

across a 1947 letter from another of the writer's close friends, Frederick

Melcher. It referred to an "unpublished poem about the war" which Frost had

written on an inside page of a book held by Melcher.

Mr Stilling discovered that the volume, a copy of Frost's second book, North of

Boston, was itself part of Virginia university's substantial Frost collection.

"I went back to the desk for the book in question and, within minutes, I had in

my hands a puzzle. There, inscribed by Frost, was a poem that began with a

'flurry of bird war' and ended with a train of sheds laying 'dead on a side track'."

The poem, with Mr Stilling's account of its discovery, will be published for the

first time in the autumn edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review. The review's editor, Ted

Genoways, was the last person to uncover a Frost poem, his discovery being seven years ago.

"The poem was published and ballyhooed as the last scrap of Frost verse we could ever expect

to read, and, at the time, it seemed most likely that was true," he said. "That is why the

discovery of a complete, unpublished, and unknown Frost poem is so staggering."

War Thoughts at Home is set in a snow-bound house at the time of the first world war. Some

blue jays are fighting outside the back door - "this flurry of bird war". The woman of the

house is disturbed from her sewing and goes to the window. The birds fall silent, and in the

next stanza one bird says to the other: "We must watch our chance/ And escape one by one/

Though the fight is no more done/ Than the war is in France." The woman thinks of the

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winter camps "where soldiers for France are made", then draws the shades. Outside the sheds

look like "cars that long have lain/ Dead on a side track".

· Robert Frost, born in San Francisco in 1874, first came to prominence as a poet in London

with his book A Boy's Will, in 1913. He became one of America's leading poets, writing on

social and philosphical themes set against rural New England. He won four Pulitzer prizes and

died in 1963 in Boston. The newly published poem will be publicly displayed for the first

time at the Harrison Institute, University of Virginia, on October 20.

HIS STYLEThough his work is principally associated with the life and

landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of

traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly

aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time,

Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. Frost

maintains a distinct position in American poetry.The author

of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes,

he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to

language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological

complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of

ambiguity and irony. Frost stands apart from other poets in the modern era in that his

sentences are clear, his verse forms traditional, and language similar to everyday speech. In

fact, Frost’ s simplicity in his poetry was so strong that one might find it difficult to classify

him as a “modern” poet

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes

Frost'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 Frost'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."

About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of

imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."

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Like the works of his great predecessor, Emerson, Frost's

poetry has never been sufficiently appreciated in England, the

country which gave him his start. This neglect may be in part a

reaction to the rather promiscuous admiration he inspired from so

many different sorts of American readers (and non-readers), many

of whom would have no time for Eliot or Stevens. But if, for some

Americans, the homely nature of Frost's materials--cows, apples,

and snow-covered woods—predisposes them to like his poetry,

such readers are no more narrow than the 'cosmopolitan' ones who

accept mythical allusions in Eliot or Pound but disdain stone walls

as a fit vehicle for serious poetry.

Frost's own formulation to an American friend in 1914 is helpful in thinking about his

achievement: he told the friend, Sidney Cox, that the true poet's pleasure lay in making ‘his

own words as he goes' rather than depending upon words whose meanings were fixed: 'We

write of things we see and we write in accents we hear. Thus we gather both our material and

our technique with the imagination from life; and our technique becomes as much material as

material itself.' It was this principle that Pound saluted in Frost when, in his review of North

of Boston, he remarked conclusively: 'I know more of farm life than I did before I had read his

poems. That means I know more of "Life".'

TIME PERIOD AND EVENTS

Many historians have characterized the period

between the two world wars as the United States'

traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S.

direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and

its casualties many fewer than those of its European

allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America's

postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers

(1921), when he noted that civilization was a "vast

edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling,

was its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, Americans

returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.

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Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing

the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters,

harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their

increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended

on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies

for farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business

of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most

agreed.

In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond

their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the

1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the

world's highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate

status symbol -- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights

and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone,

a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair

Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they

were modern and because most were American inventions and American-made.

Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern entertainments.

Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition -- a nationwide ban on the

production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution -- began in 1919, underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated,

featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing,

automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt

liberated. Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during

World War I, and had become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore

short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the

Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.

Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older

generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically,

allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,

Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual

currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier

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Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the

breakdown of traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them

back to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and

artists. William Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian

elements in all his works, as did virtually all serious American fiction writers after World War

I.

Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young

Americans of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude

Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity.

The secure, supportive family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal

rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of

patriotism; moral values inculcated by religious beliefs and observations -- all seemed

undermined by World War I and its aftermath.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's

This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost

generation. In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem The Waste Land (1922), Western civilization

is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).

The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United

States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers,

unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms.

Midwestern droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers

left the Midwest for California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The

Grapes of Wrath (1939). At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out

of work. Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally

riding freight trains -- became part of national life. Many saw the Depression as a punishment

for sins of excessive materialism and loose living. The dust storms that blackened the

midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by

day and the darkness at noon."

The Depression turned the world upside down. The United States had preached a

gospel of business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for

government in the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federal money

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created jobs in public works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals

were paid to create murals and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the

industrial build-up of World War II renewed prosperity. After Japan attacked the United

States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came to bustling

life mass-producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and supplies. War production and experimentation

led to new technologies, including the nuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimental

nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an international team of nuclear scientists,

prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

MODERNISM

The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually

emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of

the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art

as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western

civilization's classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically

different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more

technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced

these changes.

Modernism evolved by various routes. From Symbolism it took

allusiveness in style and an interest in rarefied mental states.

From Realism it borrowed an urban setting, and a willingness

to break taboos. And from Romanticism came an artist-centred view, and retreat into

irrationalism and hallucinations. Even its founding fathers did not long remain Modernists.

Pound espoused doctrinaire right-wing views. Eliot became a religious convert. Joyce's late

work verged on the surrealistic. Lewis quarrelled with everyone.

Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made "Make it new!" his

battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot,

who wrote what is arguably the most famous poem of the twentieth century--The Waste

Land--using revolutionary techniques of composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned

to untraditional sources for inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and Eliot to the

ironic poems of the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda

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Doolittle) followed Pound to Europe and wrote poems that, in their extreme concision and

precise visualization, most purely embodied his famous doctrine of imagism.

Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens--a mild-mannered

executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut--had a flair for the flashiest titles

that poems have ever had: "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the

imagination for its ability to "press back against the pressure of reality."

What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use of

quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image. What was new in E.

E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the words were in lower-case letters and a

parenthesis "(a leaf falls)" may separate the "l" from "oneliness."

William Carlos Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read," to

use a phrase of Marianne Moore. "No ideas but in things," he proclaimed. In succinct, often

witty poems he presents common objects or events--a red wheelbarrow, a person eating

plums--with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem's subject

matter can be. Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favoured traditional devices--blank verse,

rhyme, narrative, the sonnet form--but he, too, had a genius for the American vernacular, and

his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as a peculiarly modern figure who

is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee sage.

Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem capable of

encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more notably successful. In his poem

"The Bridge," the Brooklyn Bridge is both a symbol of the new world and a metaphor

allowing the poet to cross into different periods, where he may shake hands in the past with

Walt Whitman and watch as the train called the Twentieth Century races into the future.

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate

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ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake

originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations

ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for

allusion (often private) rather than description

world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states

themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view

use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal

cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter

estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms

maintenance of a wary intellectual independence

artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness

search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness

exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional

work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than

answering them

cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized

open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection

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involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening By

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.

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The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.

BACKGROUND OF THE POEM

Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening is written in the June of 1922 by

Robert Frost, in his Stone House. Frost wrote this poem about winter in June. Frost had been

up the entire night writing the long poem”New Hampshire” for which he won The Pulitzer

Prize. When he finished it, he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise

and suddenly got the idea for Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening. He wrote it in

just a few minutes and later he stated that:

“It was as if I had a hallucination.”

“Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” was Frost’s one of the most

favourite poems. That is why Frost called it:

“My best bid for rememberance”

Frost’s Stone House

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FORM OF THE POEM

The poem consists of 4 identically constructed stanzas.

There are 8 syllabus in each line.

4 lines of each stanza:1st, 2nd, 4th lines rhyme, but 3rd line rhymes for the next

stanza. That is called chain rhyme and each verse follows ”a-a-b-a schem” Iambic

tetrameter

INTERPRETATION OF THE POEM

The speaker: A man who is travelling on hourseback on the darkest evening of the year. 1st

person. We understand this by looking at the pronouns and possessive adj:I, my.

The addressee: General audience

1st STANZA: The speaker while travelling on hourseback stops to watch the woods fill up

with snow. He thinks the owner of these woods is someone who lives in the village. This

owner will not see the speaker stopping on his property

2nd STANZA: The speaker continues to gaze into the snowy woods. But, he thinks that his

little hourse is puzzled as he stops there. Because there is no a shelter like a farmhouse.

Furthermore, environment is lifeless with woods and frozen lake in the darkest evening of the

year.

3rd STANZA: While the speaker is gazing into the woods, his hourse impatiently shakes the

bells of its harness. It is as if they were in communication. The man thinks his horse ask him

whether there is a problem. In addition to the horse’s bells, there is the sound of a relaxing

wind and soft snow flakes(atmosphere)

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4th STANZA: The speaker describes the beauty and allure of the woods as “lovely,dark and

deep”. Then he reminds himself that he must not remain there. Because he has promises to

keep and there is a long journey ahead of him before he can rest for the night.

ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

Robert Frost likes uniting opposites by means of his poems. They are casual in tone

but profound in effect and intensive. When they seem to be about a particular place they

suggest ideas unlimited of space.

On the surface this poem is simple. A man stop by some woods in a snowy evening. He

enjoys the lovely scene, then he realizes he has to go because of his responsibilities. However,

it says so much in so little. For example as a familiar poem for you:

The Road not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I couldn’t travel both…

(The poet is has to choose a road to take but, he is in a complete dilemma.)

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Snow: white, pure

Evening: dark

(You see the dilemmas which the poet is in from beginning the title of the poem.)

Let’s look at the poet:

Whose woods these are I think I know

His house is in the village though

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Woods refers to nature, while village is referring the society.(2 contrasting elements)

Woods: passivity-nature-allure, beauty of the nature.

Village: activity-society-civilization-responsibilities of everyday life

Let’s look at the final stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

He describes the beauty of the nature. He is tempted, attracted by its beauty, but he realizes he

has to return to civilization/ the world of man due to his responsibilities/obligations.

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep

repetition: It shows indecisiveness. The first line comes like a penetrating gong that

you cannot ignore. It makes a sound like” ahhh”. The last line, however, seems like

death. Some criticizers think that woods are lovely dark, restful and deep sleep like

oblivion. Snow falls in downy flakes like a blanket to lie under and cover the things.

That is why it may recall us the speaker’s wish to die, maybe suicide due to the

burdens of everyday life.

Meanwhile, other criticizers thinks that:

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FIGURES OF THE SPEECH

Theme: The individual caught between nature and civilization. Dilemma whether to

give in to the allure of nature, remain in the realm of society

Tone: unhappy

The speaker: Santa Claus

The little horse: His reindeer

The darkest night: Christmas eve

The promises to keep: Santa Claus’s responsibility to

deliver presents on Christmas Eve

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Woods, village, house, horse, snow, downy flake: they are the examples of visual

imagery

"Downy flake"-The word choice of downy flake instead of snow creates imagery

which increases the quality of the poem by allowing the reader to create a mental

picture of the poem.

Bells, sounds: They are the examples of audial imagery

Woods- The word woods is repeated throughout the poem, indicating that it is a key

word.  The woods represent more than woods, though.  The woods are irrationality

and temptation.  The woods tempt the speaker to enjoy nature instead of focusing on

the task at hand.

Village-It symbolizes civilization

Horse- The horse is more than just a horse in the poem.  The horse symbolizes

speaker's conscious.  When the speaker want to give in to the beauty of the woods, the

horse reminds him of his responsibility. 

Snow: Snow is usually thought to represent winter and purity because it is white. 

However, it contributes to another element of contrast.  The white snow in the dark

woods shows gives the poem another element of contrast.

Farmhouse: The farmhouse is the other side of the conflict that the speaker

encounters. Representative of rationality, the farmhouse reminds the speaker of his

duties to himself, his horse, and those he is visiting.

Darkest evening: Normally dark is associated with evil.  It is ironic that in Frost's

poem dark is not negative.  The woods are dark and lovely.  Frost points out that just

because it is a dark night does not mean it is ominous.

Dark,frozen,evening: They symbolize death.

Lovely,dark,deep: Associating lovely with dark and deep shows that the woods are

nice to stop in not only because they are beautiful but also because they are restful and

sleepy.

But I have promises to keep: The speaker's sense of responsibility and task cause

him to discard the idea of stopping in the forest because of his practical needs and

oaths.

And miles to go before I sleep: The repetition of the last to lines is famous and

indicates that Frost is unhappy with the drudgery of responsibility.  These lines

reinforce the image that the obligations of society make life burdensome.

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POEM IN TURKISH

Kar Yağarken Ormana

bu koruluklar kimin, sanırım biliyorumama köyde duruyor sahibi korulukların;

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durup seyrettiğimi görmeyecek buradanasıl bütün ormanı kapladığını karın.

atım da şaşmış olmalı durmamabir çiftlik bile yokken yakında,

arasında donmuş gölle korularınyılın bu en karanlık akşamında.

şöyle bir sarsıyor başıyla dizginleriniacaba yanıldım mı diye.

bunun dışında duyulan tek sesesen yelle yağan kar ince ince.

korular çok güzel, karanlık, derin,ama verilmiş sözüm var benim,

ve uyumadan önce millerce yol gideceğim,ve uyumadan önce millerce yol gideceğim.

Çeviren: Cevat Çapan

Karlı Bir Akşamda Ağaçların Yanında Durma

Kimin ağaçlarıdır bunlar sanırım bilirim ben.Onun evi köyün içinde olmasına rağmen;

O beni görmeyecek burada dururken

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Karla dolmasına bakmak için ağaçlarının.Garip bulsa gerek küçük atım

Durmayı bir çiftlik evi olmadan yakınArasında donmuş gölün ve ağaçların

En karanlık akşamında yılın.

O koşum takımının çanlarına bir sallantı verirSormak için bir yanlışlık mı vardır.Başka tek ses yalnız süpürüşüdür

Rahat rüzgârın ve ince tüylü lapa lapa karın.Ağaçlar hoştur, karanlık ve derin,

Fakat tutacak sözlerim vardır benim,Ve uyumadan önce gidecek kilometrelerim.Ve uyumadan önce gidecek kilometrelerim.

Çeviren: Vehbi Taşar

REFERENCES

http://www.newtrier.k12.il.us/academics/faculty/medwin/medwinpoetryweb/4th

%20period/Roettigerweb/default.htm

http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5144

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http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5664

http://www.textetc.com/modernist.html

http://www.online-literature.com/frost/

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00598.html

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/life.htm

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rfrost.htm

http://www.frostfriends.org/

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/

http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap7/frost.html

http://www.readprint.com/author-39/Robert-Frost

http://www.pro-net.co.uk/home/catalyst/RF/rfcover.html

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section10.rhtml

www.uludagsozluk.com/k/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening

Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems, Louis Untermeyer, Washington

Square Press, 1969

American Poetry and Prose, Norman Foerster, Houghton Mifflin, 1957

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/robert-frost-aya/

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/modern/frost_3

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