” The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

These famous lines are taken from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by ROBERT FROST. A leader of the ” new era in American poetry”. He has written on almost every topic. He has illuminated things as common as woodpile and as uncommon as prehistoric pebble, as natural as the bird singing in its sleep, and as mechanist as the revolt of a factory worker. The main theme of his poetry is the despairing state of man in his life. His poetry lives with a particular aliveness because it expresses living people Robert Frost’s poems are the people; they work, and walk about, and converse. Frost preferred poetry that talked. He was always interested in rhythms of natural speech and also very interested in formal patterning and rhyme. Louis Untermeyer best describes his work as “poetry that sings and poetry that talks…his poems are people talking”.

Robert Frost was a well-known modern poet and classicist of a very high order. He does not aloof himself from contemporary society. Many do not consider him a modern poet because he chose traditional forms and structures. He used the traditional style of writing while exploring themes of alienation and isolation. Lynen observes: ”Subject matter is a poor measure of a poet’s modernity.” Frost’s poem retains their freshness, as they are less reliant on contemporary idioms, events, and people.

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom, begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, lovesickness. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” – Robert Frost. Frost’s poems are rooted in the natural world but he was careful to point out that in his poetry man is always part of the landscape. The subject matter of the poem is described but the poems go beyond descriptions. Frost said ‘you don’t want to say directly what you can say indirectly.”

THEMES-

Frost was inspired by the Romantic and Victorian poets but he is not a Nature poet in the tradition of Wordsworth and Hardy. His poetry is concerned with the drama of man in Nature. Nature can be both friend and foe; both generous and malicious. Man’s relation to nature is also both together and apart. Nature leads the poet to an insight or revelation. Frost describes a world that is bleak and empty and cold, man is empty in the midst of nature. He focuses on the dramatic struggles that occur within the natural world such as the conflict of changing seasons and the destructive side of nature. Nature is not just a background but a central character.

Robert Frost reveals a good deal about his conception of the universe and external reality in poetry. What does a man do and how does he feel in a universe as dark as this? Despite the amiable socialization of man, he is single and alone in his fate. To him, life covers both the possibility of terror and the potential of beauty. Man is depicted as a figure of isolation in the landscape. Some poems feature speakers who actively chose solitude and isolation to learn more about themselves. Most characters are isolated in one way or another. He talks about man’s hapless position in the ever-changing world. The things that can’t be altered must be understood and accepted. “Let what will be, be”.

For Frost, a wild gulf separates man and nature, spirit and matter. In several poems, he stressed the otherness and indifference of nature. Individual man and the forces of nature are two different principles that separate them and must be respected.

STYLE-

Frost made a conscious effort to use ordinary language in his poem, through the use of plain, monosyllabic speech. Frost played the colloquial rhythms against the formal patterns of lines and verse and constrained them within traditional forms such as the sonnet.  He emphasized the importance of rhyme and metrical variety, observed traditional forms, and developed technical skills. He is especially noted for his achievement in blank verse encompassing his narrative monologues and dialogues.

WORKS-

A Boy’s Will is Robert Frost’s first book, and the title not only indicates the mood but pays a tribute to Longfellow who, in “my lost youth,” wrote: a boy’s will is the wind’s will. Critics were enthusiastic about a boy’s will but they were exuberant about North of Boston, which appeared about a year later. A Boy’s Will is the poetry that sings; North of Boston is poetry that talks.  “Whether in dialogue or in lyric, his poems are people talking…the man who talks under the name of Robert Frost knows how to say a great deal in a short space, just as the many men and women whom he has listened to in New England and elsewhere have known how to express in the few words they use more truth than volumes of ordinary rhetoric can express.”

The volumes that followed North of Boston marked a continual increase in the ability to make verse talk and sing. Sometimes the poems conversed; sometimes they made their own tunes; mostly they talked and sang together.

“The Tuft of Flowers”, a poem in his first volume , expresses the whole spirit of human participation. even those who think they work alone, apart from others , have more in common than they know in common.

Four times Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the best book of poetry of the year, in 1924, for New Hampshire; in 1931 for Collected Poems; in 1937, for A Further Range; and in 1943, for A Witness Tree.

In all of Frost’s work, the reader sees a depth and level of human emotion encapsulated in verse a depth and level of human emotion that is not easily discerned by the eye, but rather felt and nurtured in the heart.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

• References from – Robert Frost’s poems by Louis Untermeyer
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339366744_Robert_Frost’s_poetry
• https://vinhanley.com/2015/05/27/an-analysis-of-the-poetry-of-robert-frost-1874-1963/