Robert frost 3
Robert frost 3Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;”(Frost 638)
In this excerpt of the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, it appears to be some nut case that is pondering over a decision that should only take half a second to decide. However, it is actually a question more complex than, “What road should we take”. What he is really asking is what road should he take in life. The two roads symbolize the two different paths in life he could take. As in everyone’s life, Frost had to make decisions like the one listed above. I would say all in all, he did a pretty damn good job of it. But in order to understand his poetry, you need to know about the man.
Robert Lee Frost, born in San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, 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 use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.
After his father's death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. In 1894 he sold "My Butterfly: An Elegy" to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Eleanor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy.
In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm 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 successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year...
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