“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.
Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors. But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death.
Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, the words above, etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.
Stop here a moment and take this Frost quiz.
1. In what city was Robert Frost born?
2. What Yankee saying does Frost’s neighbor repeat in the poem, “Mending Wall”?
3. Which President chose Frost to read a poem at his inauguration?
4. At that inauguration, why did Frost recite “The Gift Outright”?
Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature
Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article
And this is a videoblog I made at Frost’s gravesite last August:
http://www.dontknowmuch.com/2009/08/touch-of-frost-a-videoblog/
This is the website of Frost House adn Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html
Answers
1. San Francisco, California.
2. “Good fences make good neighbors.”
3. John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
4. He had written a new poem called “Dedication,” but couldn’t read it in the January glare; instead, he recited the 1942 poem, which he knew by heart.
