Editing Robert Frost (section)

==Work==

===Style and critical reception===
Critic [[Harold Bloom]] argued that Frost was one of "the major American poets".<ref name="bloom">{{cite book |last1=Bloom |first1=Harold |title=Robert Frost |date=1999 |publisher=Chelsea House |page=9}}</ref>

[[Randall Jarrell]]'s influential essays on Frost include "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial{{'"}} (1962), an extended close reading of that particular poem,<ref>{{cite web |last=Jarrell |first=Randall |title=On 'Home Burial' |url=http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/burial.htm |year=1999 |orig-year=1962 |website=English Department at the University of Illinois |access-date=October 18, 2018 |archive-date=October 2, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181002133241/http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/burial.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> and "To The Laodiceans", (1952) in which Jarrell defended Frost against critics who had accused Frost of being too "traditional" and out of touch with Modern or [[Modernist poetry]]. Jarrell wrote "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications—coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his work." Jarrell's close readings of poems like "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep" led readers and critics to perceive more of the complexities in Frost's poetry.
[[File:RobertFrost.jpg|thumb|left|160px|U.S stamp, 1974]]

[[Brad Leithauser]] notes that "the 'other' Frost that Jarrell discerned behind the genial, homespun New England rustic—the 'dark' Frost who was desperate, frightened, and brave—has become the Frost we've all learned to recognize, and the little-known poems Jarrell singled out as central to the Frost canon are now to be found in most anthologies".<ref>Leithauser, Brad. Introduction. ''No Other Book: Selected Essays''. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.</ref><ref>{{cite book | last=Nelson | first=Cary | title=Anthology of Modern American Poetry | page=84 | location=New York | publisher=Oxford University Press | year=2000 | isbn=0-19-512270-4 }}</ref> Jarrell lists a selection of the Frost poems he considers the most masterful, including "The Witch of Coös", "Home Burial", "A Servant to Servants", "Directive", "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep", "Provide, Provide", "[[Acquainted with the Night]]", "[[After Apple Picking]]", "[[Mending Wall]]", "The Most of It", "An Old Man's Winter Night", "To Earthward", "[[Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening]]", "Spring Pools", "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers", "Design" and "[[Desert Places]]".<ref>Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." ''No Other Book: Selected Essays''. HarperCollins, 1999.</ref>

{{Quote box
| title = From "Birches"<ref>{{cite web|title=Birches by Robert Frost|url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173524|website=The Poetry Foundation|access-date=18 February 2015}}</ref>
| align = right
| salign = right
| source = Robert Frost
| quote = <poem>I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.</poem>
}}

In 2003, the critic Charles McGrath noted that critical views on Frost's poetry have changed over the years (as has his public image). In "The Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation," McGrath wrote, "Robert Frost&nbsp;... at the time of his death in 1963 was generally considered to be a New England folkie&nbsp;... In 1977, the third volume of Lawrance Thompson's biography suggested that Frost was a much nastier piece of work than anyone had imagined; a few years later, thanks to the reappraisal of critics like [[William H. Pritchard]] and Harold Bloom and of younger poets like [[Joseph Brodsky]], he bounced back again, this time as a bleak and unforgiving modernist."<ref>McGrath, Charles. "The Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation." ''The New York Times Magazine''. June 15, 2003.</ref>

In ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'', editors [[Richard Ellmann]] and Robert O'Clair compared and contrasted Frost's unique style to the work of the poet [[Edwin Arlington Robinson]] since they both frequently used New England settings for their poems. However, they state that Frost's poetry was "less [consciously] literary" and that this was possibly due to the influence of English and Irish writers like [[Thomas Hardy]] and [[W. B. Yeats]]. They note that Frost's poems "show a successful striving for utter colloquialism" and always try to remain down to earth, while at the same time using traditional forms, despite the trend of American poetry towards [[free verse]], which Frost famously said was "'like playing tennis without a net.'"<ref name="Ellman 1988.">Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair. ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'', Second Edition. New York: Norton, 1988.</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Faggen|first1=Robert|title=Editor|date=2001|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|edition=First}}</ref>

The [[Poetry Foundation]] makes the same point, placing Frost's work "at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry [with regard to his use of traditional forms] and modernism [with his use of idiomatic language and ordinary, everyday subject matter]." They also note that Frost believed that "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form" was more helpful than harmful because he could focus on the content of his poems instead of concerning himself with creating "innovative" new verse forms.<ref>{{cite web |title=Robert Frost |url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost |date=March 21, 2018 |language=en-us |website=Poetry Foundation |access-date=August 4, 2022}}</ref>

An earlier study by the poet [[James Radcliffe Squires]] spoke to the distinction of Frost as a poet whose verse soars more for the difficulty and skill by which he attains his final visions, than for the philosophical purity of the visions themselves. "He has written at a time when the choice for the poet seemed to lie among the forms of despair: Science, solipsism, or the religion of the past century ... Frost has refused all of these and in the refusal has long seemed less dramatically committed than others ... But no, he must be seen as dramatically uncommitted to the single solution ... Insofar as Frost allows to both fact and intuition a bright kingdom, he speaks for many of us. Insofar as he speaks through an amalgam of senses and sure experience so that his poetry seems a nostalgic memory with overtones touching some conceivable future, he speaks better than most of us. That is to say, as a poet must."<ref>Squires, Radcliffe. ''The Major Themes of Robert Frost'', The University of Michigan Press, 1963, pp. 106–107.</ref>

The classicist [[Helen H. Bacon]] has proposed that Frost's deep knowledge of Greek and Roman [[classics]] influenced much of his work. Frost's education at Lawrence High School, Dartmouth, and Harvard "was based mainly on the classics". As examples, she links imagery and action in Frost's early poems "Birches" (1915) and "Wild Grapes" (1920) with [[Euripides]]' ''[[Bacchae]]''. She cites certain motifs, including that of the tree bent down to earth, as evidence of his "very attentive reading of ''Bacchae'', almost certainly in Greek". Bacon compares the poetic techniques used by Frost in "One More Brevity" (1953) to those of [[Virgil]] in the ''[[Aeneid]]''. She notes that "this sampling of the ways Frost drew on the literature and concepts of the Greek and Roman world at every stage of his life indicates how imbued with it he was".<ref>Bacon, Helen. "Frost and the Ancient Muses." The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 75–99.</ref>

===Themes===
In ''Contemporary Literary Criticism'', the editors state that "Frost's best work explores fundamental questions of existence, depicting with chilling starkness the loneliness of the individual in an indifferent universe."<ref name="Stine 1983 110 129">''Contemporary Literary Criticism''. Ed. Jean C. Stine, Bridget Broderick, and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983, pp. 110–129.</ref> The critic T. K. Whipple focused on this bleakness in Frost's work, stating that "in much of his work, particularly in ''North of Boston'', his harshest book, he emphasizes the dark background of life in rural New England, with its degeneration often sinking into total madness."<ref name="Stine 1983 110 129"/>

In sharp contrast, the founding publisher and editor of ''[[Poetry (magazine)|Poetry]]'', [[Harriet Monroe]], emphasized the folksy New England persona and characters in Frost's work, writing that "perhaps no other poet in our history has put the best of the Yankee spirit into a book so completely."<ref name="Stine 1983 110 129"/> She notes his frequent use of rural settings and farm life, and she likes that in these poems, Frost is most interested in "showing the human reaction to nature's processes." She also notes that while Frost's narrative, character-based poems are often satirical, Frost always has a "sympathetic humor" towards his subjects.<ref name="Stine 1983 110 129"/>

===Influenced by=== <!-- from deprecated infobox parameter -->
* [[Robert Graves]]
* [[Rupert Brooke]]
* [[Thomas Hardy]]<ref name="Ellman 1988."/>
* [[W. B. Yeats|William Butler Yeats]]<ref name="Ellman 1988."/>
* [[John Keats]]
* [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]]<ref name="crawley">{{cite journal |last1=Crawley |first1=Mary |title=Troubled Thoughts about Freedom: Frost, Emerson, and National Identity |journal=The Robert Frost Review |date=Fall 2007 |volume=17 |issue=17 |pages=27–41 |jstor=24727384 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24727384}}</ref>

===Influenced=== <!-- from deprecated infobox parameter -->
* [[Robert Francis (poet)|Robert Francis]]
* [[Seamus Heaney]]<ref name="www.learner.org series57"/>
* [[Richard Wilbur]]<ref name="www.learner.org series57"/>
* [[Edward Thomas (poet)|Edward Thomas]]<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edward-thomas|title=Edward Thomas|first=Poetry|last=Foundation|date=March 16, 2019|website=Poetry Foundation}}</ref>
* [[James Wright (poet)|James Wright]]