英美文学选读学习笔记 Robert Lee Frost

In any list of important poets in the twentieth century, regardless of nationality, Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) commands a place. He was the Pulitzer Prize winner on four occasions; the United States Senate passed resolutions honoring his birthday, and when he was 87 he read his poetry at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Frost spent his early childhood in the Far West and the family moved to New Hampshire when he was eleven. After graduating from high school as valedictorian and class poet in 1892, he entered Dartmouth College but soon left to work at odd jobs and to write poetry. In 1897 he tried college again, Harvard this time, but though he did extremely well he left in the middle because of his tuberculosis. After leaving Harvard, Frost moved to a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. For the  twelve years he supported himself by various means, ranging from shoe-making to editing a country newspaper, not to mention poetry writing. In 1912 he decided to venture everything on a literary career. He sailed for England, where his first book, A Boy's will (1913), brought him to the attention of influential critics. Following the publication of a second volume of poems, North of Boston (1914), Frost returned and chose to live on his own farm. Thereafter, although his fame grew with the appearance of a succession of books and papers, along with his teaching and lecturing at various colleges, he considered the farm his home and its activities remained the focus of his poetry. He lived to be almost 90, loved and honored not only in his native New England but throughout America.

Robert Frost is a serious poet. Though he is generally considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man's life in his long poetic career: the inspanidual's relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to his world, and to his God. His first collection A Boy's Will, whose lyrics trace a boy's development from self-centered idealism to maturity, is marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life. North of Boston is described by the author as "a book of people," which shows a brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Many of his major poems are collected in this volume, such as "Mending the Wall," in which Frost saw man as learning from nature the zones of his own limitations, and "Home Burial," which probes the darker corners of inspanidual lives in a situation when man cannot accept the facts of his condition. The same exssive idiom and brilliant observation appear in Mountain Interval (1916), containing such characteristic poems as "The Road Not Taken," "Birches" and so on.  New Hampshire (1923) that won Frost the first of four Pulitzer Prizes includes "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" which,  repeatedly discussed,  stems from the ambiguity of the speaker's choice between safety and the unknown. The collection West-Running Brook (1928) poses disturbing uncertainties about man's prowess and importance.  Collected Poems (1930) and A Further Range (1935), which gathered Frost's second and third Pulitzer Prizes, both translate modern upheaval into poetic material the poet could skillfully control. Frost's fourth Pulitzer Prize was awarded for A Witness Tree (1942) which includes "The Gift Outright," the poem he later recited at President Kennedy's inauguration. At the age of seventy Frost took up, in different forms, a religious question he had explored before, most notably in "After Apple-Picking:'' can a man's best efforts ever satisfy God? A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) are comic-serious dramatic narratives, in both of which biblical characters in modern settings discuss ethics and man's relations to God.

Robert Frost has long been well known as a poet who can hardly be classified with the old or the new. Unlike his contemporaries in the early 20th century, he did not break up with the poetic tradition nor made any experiment on form. Instead, he learned from the tradition, especially the familiar conventions of nature poetry and of classical pastoral poetry, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic exssion. A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbol or metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality, in Frost's version, "a momentary stay against confusion." Many of his poems are fragrant with natural quality. Images and metaphors in his poems are drawn from the simple country life and the pastoral landscape that can be easily understood -- mowing,  scything, wind's rustling in the grass, bird's singing, as well as ponds, roads, the cycle of the seasons, and the alternation of night and day. Given the fact that Frost's poetic world is of the rural world, the simple country life, the pastoral landscape, it would be a mistake to imagine that Frost is easy to understand because he is easy to read. Most of Frost's poems are simple in the way that they are dramatic monologues or dialogues, they are short and direct on the informational level, and they have simple diction. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature,  as well as its beauty,  and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully, which he practiced himself throughout his life.

By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, Frost achieved an effortless grace in his style. He combined traditional verse forms -- the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse --with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax. In verse form he was assorted; he wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he wrote in a form that borrows freely from the merits of both, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional. The following selections from Frost's poetry will bring the man and his rural world to life as vividly as if they were right in front of us.