Early years

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California in 1874. His father was William Prescott
Frost a journalist and his mother was Isabelle Moodie, a Scottish immigrant.
First, Frost's father was a teacher but later he become an editor of the San Francisco
Evening Bulletin, and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on
1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the
patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New
England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. Frost's mother joined the
Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.
Although his rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high
school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be
accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at
various jobs, including delivering newspapers, and working in a factory maintaining carbon
arc lamps. He did not enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry.

Public recognition for poetry

In 1912, Frost found a publisher who would print his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will,
followed by North of Boston a year later. It was at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra
Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways.
Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for one of
his most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken." Apparently, Thomas's indecision and regret
regarding what paths to take inspired Frost's work.
When Frost arrived back home after his stay in England, his reputation had preceded him,
and he was well-received by the literary world. During his lifetime, Frost would receive more
than 40 honorary degrees, and in 1924, he was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for
his book New Hampshire. He would subsequently win Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931),
A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943).
Elinor died in 1938. Diagnosed with cancer in 1937. The same year as his wife's death, Frost
left his teaching position at Amherst College.

Literary Legacy and dead

In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal. A year later, at the age of
86, Frost was honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F.
Kennedy's inauguration.
On 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate surgery. He was survived by two
of his daughters, Lesley and Irma, and his ashes are interred in a family plot in Bennington,
Vermont.

Interesting facts
Personal life
Robert Frost's personal life was plagued by grief and loss. In 1885 when he was 11, his
father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with just eight dollars. Frost's mother died of
cancer in 1900. In 1920, he had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital,
where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he
and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental
hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression

Nobel prize nominations

Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times, but he couldn't won it.

Representative poems
I would like you to read the two poems that i chose from Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
and The Oven Bird.

Meaning of the poems

“The Road Not Taken”
The meaning of the poem is about a person having to choose between two roads and he
doesn't know which road is the best for him. He analize both roads and finally he decide to
go on one of them: the road of nonconformity. Sometimes he can feel that the road more
traveled could be easier, but the less traveled road changed his life in a good way.

“The Oven Bird”

In that poem a bird, the Oven Bird, becomes the poet, and vice versa. The song of this bird
is the work of the poet changing the relationship with nature and language. Many people say
that this is a autobiographical poem.
In here Robert feels like a man that still can create great things despite his age (42).

Style
In ​"The Road Not Taken"​​ the four stanzas are five lines long with a rhyming scheme of
ABAAB in each stanza, with complete rhymes. As we can see here:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, (A)
And sorry I could not travel both (B)
And be one traveler, long I stood (A)
And looked down one as far as I could (A)
To where it bent in the undergrowth; (B)

In the case of the poem: ​“The Oven Bird” ​we can see it is written in sonnet form and
describes an ovenbird singing is a sonnet. The rhyme scheme is : AABCBDCDEEFGFG
There is a singer everyone has heard, (A)
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,(A)
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.(B)
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers (C)
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. (B)
He says the early petal-fall is past (D)
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers (C)
On sunny days a moment overcast; (D)
And comes that other fall we name the fall. (E)
He says the highway dust is over all. (E)
The bird would cease and be as other birds (F)
But that he knows in singing not to sing. (G)
The question that he frames in all but words (F)
Is what to make of a diminished thing. (G)

Poetry movement
Robert Frost belongs to the Modernist poetry, kind of poetry written between 1890 and 1950.
Notwithstanding it is usually said that Modernist poetry have begun with the French
Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War. The beginning and
ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary and it was essential to move away
from the personal feeling to an intellectual poetry about the world.

Examples of the principals poetry devices

Taken from “The Road Not Taken”, i will share with you somo poetic devices like:
Metaphor - ​We can see the whole poem is an extended metaphor. The road acts as a
metaphor for life, using directly the word “road”.
Alliteration - ​In the second stanza, in the third line we can find the words “wanted wear”,
words that keep the same sound of the letter “W”.
Personification ​- We can see that the fork Frost mention in the woods refers to the life
decisions one has to make.
Repetition -​​ In the last stanza, in the second line we can find the word “ages” is repeated.
The repetition makes the poem sound with rhythm and beauty.