The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost

Essay, Research Paper

The Road Taken By Robert Frost

1864-1973

Robert Lee Frost, was one of America’s leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions

transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional he often said, in a dig at archival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic

se of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal ( Charles Alteri, 77).

Robert s father, William Prescot Frost Jr., was something of a drifter. He worked usually as a newspaperman and sometimes squandered his wages in a saloon and casino. Frost s mother, a schoolteacher, her professional training served her well when in 18

she fled San Francisco and her improvident husband for the first time. Packing two year old Robert with her, she crossed the Continent to William s parents house. There she gave birth to Robert s sister, Jeanie. Less than ten years later Frost s My

tterfly, his first published poem appears in the Independent.

In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm his father had passed to him and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately succe

ful. A Boy’s Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston (Brocheim, 120). Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Comp

y, Frost’s primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frost’s transatlantic reputation.

In 1916 Frost suffers great nervousness while addressing Boston Authors’ Club in May, but feels more at ease when reading poems “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Sound of Trees” at Tufts College. Elinor, who was pregnant at the time had weak he

t, suffers a miscarriage. As early as 1916 Robert Frost told Louis Untermeyer that he had already passed through several phases, four to be exact as a poet and considered himself permanently shaped. He knew what it was he could do well. He intended t

go ahead and do it, and along the way make certain that everyone who counted knew what he was doing and appreciated him (Abrams, 235). I have myself in a strong box where I can unfold as a personality at discretion.

During his most productive years as a poet, Robert Frost pursued his three careers simultaneously poet, farmer, and college professor and while he would not have traded any of them for the lot of anyone else on earth, he recognized that he did not re

ly fit in with the average practitioner of any of those vocations. He was a different breed. Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimension transcend any region (Abrams, 237), yet the rhythms of New England, its land and people, were imprinted deeply

Frost s soul, and he saw in the most commonplace observations a metaphor for his own spiritual loneliness.

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, is a poem full of symbols, he uses nature images to get his point across. If the reader doesn’t pay close attention to what he is reading, he might find it very easy to get confused. Robert Frost writes his poems

ike this, so that he can get the reader to think about life and what he is saying. This sense of his own inner divisions is perfectly reflected in his The Road Not Taken. The poem s surface meaning is that we have choices in life, and our lives can tu

out completely differently depending on the options we choose. Frost himself notes that he wrote The Road Not Taken, not with himself in mind, but a friend: One stanza of The Road Not Taken was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle o

England. . . . I wasn t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn t go the other. He was hard on himself that way . Later, Frost discovered his friend died durin

the war in Europe.

Everyone is a traveler, choosing the roads to follow on the map of their continuous journey, life. There is never a straight path that leaves one with but a sole direction in which to head. Regardless of the original message that Robert Frost had inten

d to convey, his poem, “The Road Not Taken”, has left its readers with many different interpretations. It is one s past, present and the attitude with which he looks upon his future that determines the shade of the light that he will see the poem in. In

ny case however, this poem clearly demonstrates Frost s belief that it is the road that one chooses that makes him the man who he is (Houma, 92). Often in life, we are left to wonder what might have happened, what could have been, and how things would

ve turned out.. if only.. There are times when we are sure that those other choices might have led to unfound greatness but there are also moments when we feel as though we were indeed better off not having journeyed down such unsure paths. Neverth

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать