Robert Frost Poetry Characteristics

[Giraldo Allain]

Thisdocument summarizes characteristics of Robert Frost's poetry. It discusses Frost's clarity and simplicity of expression, his realistic depictions of rural life, his balanced philosophy of accepting life's difficulties while maintaining optimism, his skill in dramatic monologues, metaphysical and lyrical elements in his poetry. Frost was an American poet honored for publishing initially in England and winning four Pulitzer prizes. The document provides references for further reading on Frost's poetry.Read less

Listening to Frost talk about politicians and politics in his way, I came to admire him for his fierce self-regard more than I would have expected to; whether cause or effect or accompanying condition, it was certainly connected with his great gift. A very old, swollen, slowly moving man, he defended every particle of existence left to him and remembered every grief with a depth of feeling for those he had lost; the subtlety and hardness of his thinking were particularly striking in the company of people always concessive, watchful, neutral, and subdued. He was from another species, where people were smarter but also not afraid to suffer. He was openly vulnerable. In the candid commentary to his large volume of selected Frost letters,1 Professor Lawrance Thompson, Frost's designated biographer, contrasts Frost's lack of confidence with his strong pride in himself as a poet. Frost gave the impression of fighting to keep everything he had won, of having to triumph over every obstacle, of wanting to call on everything within reach for his continuing education. Of course I had known about Frost's early difficulties in getting a hearing, and that it was only in England, when he was thirty-nine, that he was able to get his first book published; I knew that he relished his many academic honors all the more because of his own brief and irregular attempts at a college education. But it was startling to find Frost reciting all his early college grades and still cursing Pound for a braggart as he walked up and down the cold Amherst streets after he had had a too exciting evening reading from his poems in Johnson Chapel and could not sleep. He would recite his life over again, exactly as he does in so many letters to scholars, critics, reviewers, and collectors in Professor Thompson's book. Yet the most extraordinary thing about his verbal memories was the spell they put on him as he recited them. The transitions were as wonderful, original, and clairvoyant as they are in his best poems; even when he was shaking with fatigue and cold but would obstinately refuse to go to bed until he had talked himself out, his ideas were sinewy, shrewd, right on the button. I understood better why Frost felt related to Emerson, despite the difference in their philosophies. One of Emerson's early biographers remembers him talking in a stream of perfect sentences even when he was dying. Frost's sentences were achieved definitions, and showed an obsessive drive to clarity. One felt that they were a physical necessity.

In quarters naturally hostile to poetry that requires intellectual effort, Frost enjoyed a misleading reputation as a poet accommodating to average capacities and prejudices. Actually Frost had a bleak, if stoical, outlook; the religious faith which in private came out like the most stubborn of his loves was perhaps more a fact in Frost's complicated personal strategy for living than in his work, which in its best period did not seek to express personal beliefs, but dramatized concrete situations as new material for poetry. What makes Frost's poetry unusually interesting to the general reader is Frost's subject matter, which is characteristic experience in dramatic encounters. Frost does not write about poetry or about making the modern world safe for poetry, the usual themes of romantic and symbolist poets, for whom the poet himself is the hero. Frost writes about situations which threaten the moral balance of the passerby who has fallen into the situation. He makes poetry out of the dramatic, startling contest with the negative blackness that begins everywhere outside the hard-won human order. Frost's poetry is about the strength needed for living one's life, and it is about living in a way that differs very sharply from the stock poetry of modern life as a tragedy of disbelief, from the self-conscious ironies of literary reference that make the poet sound like Hamlet talking to Polonius.

To read Frost's best poems is to have a series of satisfactions in the intellectual, emotional, and technical conquest of difficulties. They certainly do not inspire the reader with the wonder of pure imagination that is found in Yeats; even Hardy, whom we inevitably think of when reading Frost, gives the reader a sense of the Biblical cosmos, the more-than-human significance of the creation itself, that we do not find extending out of Frost's dramatic narratives. Frost's poems are directly about struggle; the terms of the struggle are defined with satisfying honesty and exactness, even to the epistemological difficulties that man encounters in getting to know the world. One feels in reading Frost's best pieces that he has defined certain difficulties of existence exactly, and has solved them just in the nick of time, so that little is left over for man's imaginative edification. Poetry now exists as if to assure us of another world, more worthy of our imagination; and when Eliot or Stevens actually makes us see this other world, we are dazed and grateful, as if the gold diffused in the sea had solidified and were now shining in our eyes. But Frost, who said that Stevens wrote on bric-a-brac, wanted to make poetry the triumph of this world. His hand-carved poems came out without the slightest concession to elegance, and the imaginative splendor he achieved, deeply impressive but by no means meant to impress you with splendor anywhere else, lay in the idiosyncratic truth of his lines, in the depth of experience that we associate with such masterful ability to achieve transitions. Just as Frost's God did not seem to extend to the world, so that He held the balance of existence but would not influence it, so Frost's poems do not make living easier, or imaginatively more luxurious. But they are immensely satisfying, because of the voice that prevails in them.

The frost I briefly knew fought for fame, for control of his reputation, for mastery of human experience, on terms which he seemed able to impose on the younger and more passive people around him. So in this book of his letters, one hears Frost talking about his own life, advancing his career, handling the many people who were useful to him. A letter for Frost was an exercise in assertion, without the charm that the interplay of poetic narrative called out of him. Frost did not like writing letters and he did not surrender to anything when he wrote one. But the letters together make an impressive account of Frost's efforts to establish himself and to uphold himself. The severity of his struggles stuck to him in his triumph and became for him the characteristic mark of triumph.

The poet Robert Frost was one of the most important figures in the history of English literature. He was a poet who become famous in the 20th century when there was no chance of it as America was going through some major changes. He was the poet who was read, discussed and criticised at a wider level. His readings were not bound to his own people but to every person living in faraway countries. Critics applauded Robert Lee Frost poetry due to its salient features as well as characteristics. One of the most famous among them was his description of rural images. Both classic as well as modern groups of poets admired his poetry and regarded his poems as the best simple and realistic poems ever written in the history of English literature just because of the use of colloquial style.

There is no denying the fact that we read Robert Frost because of his clear and realistic picture of rural images. He paints such types of scenes which we can visualise without seeing when we read his poetry. He is also known as an outdoor poet just because of his clear description of images. We read poetry and see rural pictures through his imagination. His images spark off the senses. Although he does not draw visual images yet we cannot underestimate his power to let his readers watch the world through words. He never exaggerates things. His poetry is always realistic in nature. If he ever illustrates any problem in any of his poems then it is the problem of every common man. He motivates and targets the common people through his poetry. It seems that his targeted audience was somebody who can barely read. In short, he does poetry for laymen. He remains realistic; therefore, there is no chance of ambiguity in the poetry of Robert Frost. Thus, reality and the portrayal of realistic rural images are major characteristics or salient features of Robert Frost poetry. Once he said:I am not a regionalist, I am a realist. I write about realms of democracy and realms of the spirit.

Critics always first judge the clarity in the poetry of a poet. Poetry has no limits and the choice of words always depends on the poet; however, simple language is what helps the readers to understand the poem completely and also helps them to understand the motive of the poet. Some poets use far-fetched metaphors and similes which increase ambiguity but Robert Frost denies all that and uses language that even a layman can understand. He does not only portray rural life but writes poetry for the people who can read it without any obstruction.

Many poets write dramatic poetry. It cannot be said that no one can surpass Frost in writing dramatic poetry. There are poets who can write better dramatic poems; however, blending dramatic effects with a philosophy of life, based on reality, make the poems of Robert Frost extraordinary. I am of the view that it is one of the major characteristics or salient features of Robert Frost poetry.

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