Introduction

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His
work was initially published in England before it was published in America.
Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American
colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New
England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and
philosophical themes.

Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime and is the only poet to receive
four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary
figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold
Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet
laureate of Vermont.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost’s work is especially universally appealing. Such universal themes as

nature and humanity are explored in most of his poetry. The Road Not Taken,
After Apple Picking, and Mending Wall are but a few examples of his work that
transcends borders to appeal to every man who has walked the earth. Human
nature, for instance, is well treated in After Apple Picking where Frost writes: “I
am overtired, of the great harvest I myself desired.” Isolation, another universal
theme, widely features in Frost’s work. He emphasizes man’s alienation and
loneliness despite his being a socialized creature. In Frost’s works, man’s
relationship with himself and his solitariness in dealing with his own fate is
explored. “We keep the wall between us as we go,” he says in Mending Wall, “To
each the boulders that have fallen to each.”

Yet despite the universality in his work, Frost is unapologetically regional and uses
precisely this regionalism to expound on his universal themes. His regionalism
helps explain why Frost is one of the leading poets of 20th Century America.
Perhaps the most prominent feature of Frost’s poetry that claims its source in his
region of New England is the treatment of nature. Indeed, nature is omnipresent in
all of Frost’s poetry.

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It can be seen in the scent of the apples, in the yellow wood where two roads
diverge, in leaves no step had trodden black, in the apple trees that will never get
across and eat the cones under his neighbor’s pines, in the frozen swamp on a gray
day, and in the sea at which the people along the sand look all day.

The New England countryside and pastoral way of life in which Frost spent a
significant amount of his childhood and adulthood are evident in his work. The
landscape presents Frost with a quiver of symbols with which to drive home the
intended message. The Road Not Taken is one such poem. “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.”
Here, we see Frost use the two roads to symbolize choice and the crossroads at
which we often find ourselves when we have to make a decision. The leaves that
no step had trodden black symbolize the less popular choice we may take, even
though like the protagonist, we may look back with longing and perhaps wonder
what would have become of us had we taken the other road.

Robert Frost as a Regional Poet

The particular region which he has selected for his purposes is New England and
he has represented and interpreted this region, accurately and precisely, in one
poem after another. Its physical features, its people, its ways and manners, its
habits, traditions, customs, beliefs, and codes of conduct, appear and reappear in
one poem after another. But he does not render and interpret the whole of New
England. He deals only with that part of it which lies to the north of Boston. The
other parts of New England such as Massachusettes, Connecticut, and Maine
appear only rarely in his poems. Further, the industrial sites and fishing villages are
ignored by him. There is no mention of railway train and automobiles, and
factories giving out smoke and gas, or of radios or of large-scale migration to the
cities. As J. F. Lynen points out, “He chooses, not simply what is real in the region,
what is there, but what is to his mind the most essential, what is representative. The
delimiting of rural New England is only the first step. Even within the area we still
find the great mass of detail suppressed in favour of a few significant local traits.
Now it should be clear that this process of representing the locality as a whole
through a limited set of visual images and of portraying the culture and mentality
of the region through a particular kind of character is really a mode of symbolism.

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 What emerges from Frost’s scrupulous selection is not reality itself, but a symbolic
picture expressing the essence of that reality. Frost’s regionalism is both symbolic
and creative.”

It is the region, which lies north of Boston, which forms the background to the
poems of Frost, “It is a landscape, pearly in tone, and lonely to those who do not
recognize its friendliness. It is a landscape broken in outline, with views but not
giant views, mountains but not too high ones, pastures, swamps, farms deserted
and farms occupied.”

The scenery Frost describes, the people and their occupations, which he presents,
and language which he uses, are all peculiar to this selected region. The massive
birches swinging in fierce winter storms is a common sight in New England and
Frost has immortalized it in his famous poem, ‘The Birches’. ‘Blueberrie’ brings
out skill and vividity of New England berry-pickers. Similarly, true is Frost’s
picture of the tired farmer going home for rest after day’s labour of picking apples:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Towards heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.”

Thrift is the recognized trait of the inhabitants of New England. “Perhaps the
rugged land fostered in the settlers of New England an attitude of making the most
of what was available to them. Whatever the causes, the Yankees early developed
the fine art of making the best of things. Thrifty and hard-working, they had little
time for idle talk.” The farmer in ‘Blueberries’, who fed his entire family on
blueberries, is thrifty, one who has put to use Shakespeare’s adage, “Sweet are the
uses of adversity”.

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 Conclusion

Frost suggests much more than he actually describes, with the result that the
impression created is that a whole region has been completely described in all its
facets. There is much selecting of material, yet the impression of wholeness is
created, and this impression is an important aspect of Frost’s regional art. The New
England in ‘Mending wall’ is the same New England as we find in ‘Birches’, the
New England in ‘The Code’ is the New England of ‘Stopping by woods’, ‘Home
Burial’, ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’, ‘The Cow In Apple Time’, all exist within a
single world.