A Study Guide for the Poetry of Robert Frost
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1874. His mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, was of Scottish descent; his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon, England who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.
Frost's father was a good teacher, and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which was eventually merged into the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. The road not taken for young Robert might have been as a Californian editor rather than a New England poet, but William Frost Jr. died May 5, 1885, debts were settled, and the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts where William Frost, Sr., 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.
Despite his later association with rural life, Frost lived in the city, and published his first poem in the Lawrence high school magazine. He attended Dartmouth College, 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 factory labor. He did not enjoy these jobs at all, feeling his true calling as a poet.
Reading Guides to Frost's Poetry
(please note, these guides are strictly copyright of Exam Shack and Peter Cawley MA)
Robert Frost: The Pasture
Work and its value. (The Wood Pile, After Apple Picking, Death of the Hired Man, Mowing, The Tuft of Flowers...Continues>>
Robert Frost: Ghost House
“Purple-stemmed” is very suggestive to me: is it to you? Of what? Why is this modifier given such a powerful position in the poetic line? Continues>>
Robert Frost: Waiting Afield at Dusk
Blank verse, iambic pentameter. Two long sentences, arranged into two blank-verse stanzas. (Not free verse...Continues>>
Robert Frost: Mowing
Sonnet connects octave and sestet with a colon. Worth seeing this as a feature of the use of sonnet form...Continues>>
Robert Frost: The Tuft of Flowers
Couplets draw ideas sharply together in ways that can be provocative.
Good example of how couplets can be effective in the rhyming of “keen” and “view the levelled scene”. Continues>>
Robert Frost: In Hardwood Groves
“pierced by flowers” is suggesting oxymoron, until you think of the realities of determined foliage! Notice intratextual fact...Continues>>
Robert Frost: Mending Wall
Inversion of normal word order in first line: why? What effect does it have on our reading? Rule of three operates...Continues>>
Robert Frost: The Death of the Hired Man
The first four lines look like a young romantic girl (“musing on the lamp-flame” seems a stereotypically romantic image) who one assumes to be eager...Continues>>
