Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Are you a poetry reader or do you find it hard to understand? Unlike short stories or novels poems are short and to the point, just enough to capture your attention. All poems are different with different meanings and different images. One famous poet is Robert Frost who seems to enjoy capturing more natural settings. He was born in 1874, in San Francisco, but later moved to Massachusetts, where after high school he married Elinor White. His first book A Boys Will, was published in 1913 and his second; North of Boston, was published in 1914. Frost received many awards including 4 Pulitzer Prizes, honorary degrees, and the Bollingen Poetry Prize. Even though he was a very successful poet things seemed to go downhill fast after the death of his wife, three of his children, and his sister. It is said that after this “he later struggled with the decline of his poetic powers,” (DiYanni, 668). Readers can see the depression, bitterness, and loneliness of Frost’s life within his poems. He died in 1963 at the age of 87. Frost uses the imagery of nature and symbolism to convey the deeper meaning of his poetry.

The nature settings in Frost’s poetry bring them to life and draw the reader in to more of an everyday style. His technique of writing and descriptiveness makes his poetry so intriguing. Some of the ways Frost describes these natural settings kind of make you want to look at the world around you differently, in a more beautiful sense. When reading Frost’s poems his visual settings are always in a seasonal sense and you could almost see the sensory that is around him. His poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a perfect example of a winter setting. The title itself allows you to start picturing a dim, white, evening like setting. The descriptiveness of this poem is one to easily picture for those that could understand it. While reading through it you can sort of just put yourself into his world by the choice of descriptive words with a natural setting twist. You can picture him above the horse, in front of a small cottage, in the middle of the gloomy woods, with the lovely white snow all around to give the poem a heavy, but peaceful feeling. “The Tuft of Flowers” is another poem with a beautiful visual image, although it is different because it seems to be set around a happier time, like spring. Frost describes this as a content, peaceful, early spring morning, almost as if he was there himself as a young boy. The visual images seem to be a large, grassy area with the sun just rising so you could see the morning dew on all of the individual strands of the freshly mowed grass. The there is the tiny butterfly that floats around and leads him to the beautiful tuft of flowers along side the brook.

Frost’s poems don’t just have natural settings; they also secrete a deeper symbolic meaning. When reading Frost’s poems you could almost tell that he was over coming many emotional struggles on his life; which I believe were also used as inspiration to his poems by expressing the different seasons of the year. Also being tied into his wonderful description of imagery you can