Robert Frost: American Poet

Robert Frost is as beloved an American icon as apple pie, as revered an American figure as Neil Armstrong, and as talented an American poet as Edgar Allen Poe.  Though he may be popular because of the accessibility and seeming simplicity of his poetry, Frost never fails to hold our attention as we peer deeper, owing to the actual complexity and insightfulness he intricately winds into his lyrically mesmerizing poems.  Frost manages to seamlessly blend traditionalist poetic styles and forms with modernist ones, and the result is unforgettable poetry that displays an uncanny ability to be at once personal and universal; immediate and timeless. 

Frost’s poetry can be considered traditional in both its form and its subject matter.  He carefully and meticulously constructed his poems, using rhyme and meter religiously—in fact, he openly opposed the use of free verse—and he wrote about such topics as would seem rooted in transcendentalist thought.  His works consist predominantly of nature poetry, with many links to the transcendentalist theme of spirituality found in and of the natural world—as in the temptation of a nearly attainable great truth or divinity waiting in the mirrored surface of still water, portrayed tauntingly in “For Once, Then, Something.”  He also held a deeply heartfelt and moving appreciation of the beauty to be discovered in small, everyday scenes, items, or occurrences—such as the observation of the eternal loveliness of snow falling gently on dark trees in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or the indulgent joy found in spotting a grove of birch trees and imagining childhood pleasures, as affectionately described in “Birches.”  

For all this, Frost was also inarguably a product of the modernist era.  His visually descriptive poems, along with their great respect of natural splendor and consciousness of the divine in the world around us, take on a new, modern twist; he fears, it seems, that the divinity he sees imbuing nature may not care about him—that the powerful forces at work in the universe mightn’t be so benevolent and loving after all…  We can almost see his heartbreaking transition from hopeful to discouraged by noting the difference in tone from the calmly joyous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to the desperately frightened and lonely “Desert Places,” written 13 years later.  The unsympathetic “rage” of the ocean in “Once by the Pacific” is a reminder that Mother Earth believes in tough love at best, or even that God may be angry and vengeful still: “There would be more than ocean-water broken / Before God’s Put out the Light was spoken.”  Frost’s uncertainties about the indifference or even existence of a supreme being were typical of the disillusion many modernist artists were facing at the time, and his use of poetry as a response to feelings of isolation, loneliness, and ambiguity was, in itself, a modernist reaction. 

Along with this darker side of Frost’s poetry, his work was modernist in structure and technique, as well.  His experimentation with form, which made wonderful use of blank verse, was international in origin: his poems are reminiscent in tone of Shakespeare’s prose combined with lyric English verse.  He used playfulness and adopted a humorous quality in his work when broaching serious and profound subjects, such as the mental and physical isolation found in the outwardly amusing “Mending Wall.”  And, of course, Frost’s poetry is ceaselessly American in its ringing accolade to freedom—freedom from boundaries, freedom from restraint, and freedom of choice: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by…”  You know the rest—after all, it’s Frost.