Topic: american poetry of the 1st half of 20th century. The specific features of robert frost’s poetry contents

Robert Frost

If Robinson brought American poetry in the twenties century, it was his fellow New Englander Robert Frost who would make the decisive break from the inflated style of Victorian and genteel poetry. Where Robinson’s poems remain highly “literary” in their diction and syntax, Frost adopts the idiosyncratic, colloquil and locally inflected voice of the New England farmer. Where Robinson made brilliant use of sound and meter and to emphasize and the meanings of his poems, Frost articulated a more theoretical formulation of the connection between sound and meaning.

In the most famous critical formulation, Frost advocated what he called the “sound of sense”, by which he meant that poetry should communicate through its sound even before we grasp its semantic meaning. He wrote to his friend John Bartlett in 1913 that the best way to hear the sound of sense is to listen to voices behind a door that cut off the words.
Robert frost had a difficult early life. He was born in San Francisco in 1874, but his impulsive and alcoholic father died in 1885 at the age of 34 and the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Robert Frost entered Dartmouth Collage in 1892 but dropped out after one semester five years later he w as able to enter Harvard as a special student, but once against withdrew before completing his education. One the advice of his doctor, Frost bought a farm in Derry hoping the country air would benefit his health. But providing for himself and his growing family as a chicken farmer was a constant struggle. As a result of the constant shortage of money and the isolation of rural life, Frost at times contemplated suicide. Frost spent eleven years in Derry, engaging in many activities described in his poems:
Mowing fields, mending walls, hiking, blueberrying and cutting wood. The authenticity of his outdoor experience was itself to make him a very different poet from his more genteel contemporaries. He rejected the insipid romantcim of most American verse of the time, and the set out to write a poetry more grounded in the reality of rural life and the immediacy of its spoken language. As a result of Frost’s unconventional approach, his poetry was not easily accepted in his own country. By the age of 38, he had yet publish a book of his verse and had succeeded in placing only a few of his poems in magazines. Frost decided to move to England , where he felt his poetry might find greater acceptance.
With the help of Boy’s Will with an English press:, it was published in London in 1913. North of Boston appeared the following year and when Frost return to America in 1915 be arranged for the books American publication Frost’s third volume, Mountain interval came out in 1916, firmly establishing him as one of the foremost American poets poets of his generation .