An Assessment of the Poetry of Robert Frost

Nature is beautiful in every aspect, but as nature changes with every season, beauty and innocence in human life is much the same as the years progress. Robert Lee Frost uses nature in such a profound approach; every aspect of nature can someway correlate with any characteristic of life. Whether it is the beauty in nature signifying the joy and happiness that every person experiences, or it be the traumatic losses and disappointments that may lead to ultimate failure or destruction, Robert Frost illustrates life, love and loss in the most natural and beautiful way feasible. His style is uniquely his own, and his themes are ones that many people can relate to on countless levels, which is what made Frost so popular during his lifetime, and has continued four decades after his death.

Robert Frost was born March 26 1874 in San Francisco where he spent the first eleven years of his life until his father died. It was then that he moved with his family to Lawrence, Massachusetts. While in high school in Lawrence, Frost fell in love with Elinor White, they became engaged and married in 1896 (the same year that their son Elliott was born). After withdrawing from Harvard in 1897, the Frost’s moved to a farm in Methuen, Massachusetts, and began raising poultry. Three years later Elliott died, along with Frost’s mother. Frost and his family then bought a farm in Derry, where they settled down, and Frost began writing. Robert and Elinor Frost had three more children before losing another infant in 1907. In 1912, Frost became irritated with his failure at success, and moved his family to England. This move proved to be successful when Frost’s first book A Boy’s Will was published in 1913, followed by North of Boston in 1914; both books appeared in the United States as well by the time that the Frost family returned in 1915. In 1938 Frost lost his wife to illness. New Hampshire garnered Frost the first of his unmatched four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, followed by Frost's Collected Poems in 1930, A Further Range in 1936, and A Witness Tree in 1942. Frost’s crowning public moment was his recitation of "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in January of 1960. He died on January 29, 1963. Robert Frost lived a very long and often tragic life. He suffered unreasonable guilt, and blamed himself for everything that went wrong. Robert Frost loved his f...

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... to gain wisdom. This wisdom should not be what the speaker feels in the last line, that innocence is great and loss of it is to be mourned. This wisdom is in the title of the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay." Here is Frost telling the speaker to understand that this is the natural way, and so there is no point in fighting it or being sad about it. In fact, within every leaf is just a leaf...meaning without the gold there is no green, without dawn there is no day, without death there is no birth. It is just the way it is and so we better love it.

Robert Frost’s poems are beautifully written, and offer such a deep insight into life, and nature. His work connects to readers on virtually every level of consciousness, and generates readers to understand that their feelings are not rare. Everyone experiences the same emotions, and must overcome many of the same situations in life; but his poems almost bring the sense of possibility. Frost may have become popular at the dawn of the nineteenth century, his life may have ended almost half a century ago, but his poems are still as distinguished as they were before his death, and they will continue to be popular for many years to come.