ROBERT FROST

March 26, 1874-January 29, 1963

1922 Levinson Prize 1924 Pulitzer Prize for poetry

1928 Golden Rose Trophy 1931 National Institute of Arts and Letters

1937 Mark Twain Medal 1941 Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America

1949 Gold Medal Limited Editions Club 1950 Unanimous Resolution in his honor and gold medal

from the US Senate 1953 American Academy of Poets Award 1956 Medal of Honor New York University

1958 Huntington Hartford Foundation Award 1961 Participated in John F Kennedy’s inauguration

ceremonies 1962 Congressional Gold Medal 1963 Bollingen Prize in Poetry

1986 Inducted into the American’s Poet corner at Cathedral of St. John the divine

AUTHOR RESEARCH GUIDEDUE: 4/21/2015

Students are to research an author who has three or more published works and complete this biographic report which will include a PowerPoint presentation which will be presented in class on the day assigned.

WRITTEN PORTION The written portion of the assignment will encompass three to five typed pages, with a

brief biography wherein the author’s history, philosophy, and challenges will be discussed.

POWERPOINT PRESENTATION The slide portion of the assignment will contain a minimum of 3-to-5 slides (not including

cover and Works Cited pages) dedicated to a brief overview of the written portion. Also included in the PowerPoint presentation will be a minimum of three slides for each of

the three works written by the author that the student has chosen to highlight.

CONTENTS OF SLIDES Cover page (cover slide) Main characters discussed in a brief overview. Plot/implications – or why the author wrote the piece. Favorite quote attributed to the author from this work or about this work with a brief analysis of said

quote. Works Cited slide

 

The Gift OutrightPresented at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.

The land was ours before we were the land’s.She was our land more than a hundred yearsBefore we were her people. She was oursIn Massachusetts, in Virginia,But we were England’s, still colonials,Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,Possessed by what we now no more possessed.Something we were withholding made us weakUntil we found out that it was ourselvesWe were withholding from our land of living,And forthwith found salvation in surrender.Such as we were we gave ourselves outright(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)To the land vaguely realizing westward,But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,Such as she was, such as she would become.

Summary

What is most telling about this poem is the thirteenth line, seeming to “appear all the more ominous by its entire lack of tonal and grammatical relationship with any thing else in the poem, an isolation signaled, of course, by the parentheses. Almost by itself this line justifies Frost's own characterization of the poem as being "about Revolutionary War," rather than, in a more general way, about the forming of a spiritual commitment to the land. Omit the thirteenth line and the poem is still a very good, though undoubtedly a very different, one—in some sense, perhaps, the ‘basic poem’ to which the apparently gratuitous reminder of war is the poet's own gift outright. Moreover, the line is almost all that prevents us from taking the poem as simply an interesting, but finally conventional and unambiguous, patriotic effusion, something rather like what Frost must have had in mind when, in an unguarded moment, he compared the poem to The Star-Spangled Banner.”

AnalysisKey to the irony in this poem is the phrase "The deed of gift," a phrase which means more when considered along the lines of a legal term. As defined in Black's Law Dictionary it is "A deed executed and delivered without consideration"—that is, without expectation of return, a legal promise to give or donate. Frost might have come across these words in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus where Mephistopheles tells the learned Doctor that he "must bequeath" his soul "solemnly / And write a deed of gift with thine own blood . . ." (II, i. 35-36).

Frost was no stranger to the play. As a student, Frost had composed a shortened version where he claimed that "Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers: 'Why this is Hell, nor am lout of it." (ll. 242-243)In the play as in the poem, the distinctive peculiarities of the "deed of gift" are that it is sealed in blood and that it involves the giving of the self, body and soul.

Analysis

“Perhaps the significance of the influence consists mainly in the implication that Frost thought of the development of American national character in terms of the Faust myth. Certainly the allusion to Faustus' compact with Mephistopheles casts a lurid light over Frost's use of the verb "possess." If in Frost's implied scheme one may be "possessed" either by a debilitating God or by an invigorating Satan, it will be seen that we remained weak so long as our political, cultural, and, by extension, our spiritual allegiances were to England, a force which figures in the poem as a distant, invisible, yet powerful governing agency; we remained weak and dependent precisely because we were "withholding" ourselves spiritually from the tempting natural environment that was supporting us materially. As in Doctor Faustus, the "deed of gift" invokes the issue of "salvation," though in Frost's parable, the Faustian spirit of America is …. actually redeemed from weakness by a surrender to and immersion in the violent destructiveness of nature, self-reliance and war.” (Explicator)

John F. Kennedy’s InaugurationJanuary 20, 1961

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Summary

The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road.

Analysis

This is a very misunderstood poem. One of the attractions is its archetypal dilemma, one we recognize because each of us encounters it many times, both literally and figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, along with its crises and decisions. These are Identical forks, symbolizing the nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an increase of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two.

WORKS CITED

Cook, Reginald. Robert Frost: A Living Voice [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974], p. 133.)

Hoffman, Daniel. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Books, 1962 452 p. 19 cm.

Von Frank, Albert J. The Explicator 38:1 (Fall 1979) pp. 22-23.