Which Practice Was Typical of Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is 1 of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, whose work remains pop. Poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ are widely quoted, taught, studied, and loved. These poems have besides given us some well-known quotations.

But what are Robert Frost’due south most famous, and best, quotations? The following list has been compiled from his poetry and his prose writings. As is our usual practice here at
Interesting Literature, we’ve included just those quotations which can be clearly traced to Frost’s written works.

‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

This is one of the most famous lines in Frost’s poetry, from his poem ‘Mending Wall’, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Is Frost himself endorsing this idea – that in club to maintain good relations with our neighbours, we need to enforce articulate boundaries between us and them?

The sentiment did not originate with Frost. In 1640, an East. Rogers wrote a letter containing the following piece of wisdom: ‘A good fence helpeth to keepe peace between neighbours; but let vs take heed that we make not a high stone wall, to keepe vs from meeting.’ Simply it was Robert Frost’s employ of this piece of homespun wisdom – which is critiqued and even undermined as ‘Mending Wall’ develops – which really cemented the sentiment in the popular consciousness.

‘Nothing gold can stay’.

This is the championship and closing line of one of Frost’due south greatest short poems. The poem was published in 1923 in the
Yale Review
before beingness collected, later the aforementioned year, in Frost’s poetry collection
New Hampshire.

The meaning of the line is that nada beautiful, rare, or precious lasts for long. But Frost’southward choice of the auxiliary verb ‘can’ suggests that this is the manner it’due south meant to be: nature is not meant to exist static.

‘Some say the world will terminate in burn, / Some say in ice.’

These lines are from some other of Frost’s all-time-known short poems, ‘Burn down and Ice’. Frost wrote ‘Fire and Ice’ in 1920, and it was published inHarper’s Magazinein December of that year.

Frost tells us that he has heard some people say that the world will end in fire, while others reckon information technology will finish in ice. In other words, the world will either fire upward or freeze up.

‘And miles to go before I sleep.’

These are the famous endmost words of another archetype Robert Frost poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. In the poem, Frost tells us that, inviting as the woods are, he has prior commitments that he must honor, so he must get out this place of peace and tranquillity and proceed on his journey before he can sleep for the night.

‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’

Hither’s another memorable line from a famous Frost verse form, ‘Acquainted with the Night’ (1928), a lyric poem in which the speaker tells us
that he has walked exterior, and home once more, in the pelting at nighttime. He has walked far, out to the farthest edges of the metropolis, where the city lights terminate and he is plunged into a deeper darkness.

‘Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.’

This is the title of a 1942 verse form past Frost, and reminds us that, whilst true happiness may be short-lived, it is an intense feeling of joy which we should treasure when it makes a rare appearance in our lives.

‘A poem begins every bit a lump in the throat, a sense of incorrect, a homesickness, a lovesickness.’

This is ofttimes quoted in relation to Frost’s attitudes on the purpose of poetry. It comes from a letter to Louis Untermeyer written on 1 January 1916.

His apply of the word ‘homesickness’ is especially intriguing, since it reminds the states that poetry is frequently about the loss of something, and about trying to recover that lost thing. Indeed, the give-and-take ‘nostalgia’ means literally ‘the hurting of returning dwelling’, and nostalgia is an important theme in Frost’s poesy, some of which is almost babyhood memories.

‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.’

Many of Frost’southward best prose utterances are on the discipline of poetry and the emotional ability of poetry. Here, in his 1939 essay ‘The Figure a Verse form Makes’, Frost underlines the importance of the poet being moved by what they write, if they promise to move their readers, too.

‘Writing complimentary verse is similar playing tennis with the net downwardly.’

Frost fabricated this now-famous pronouncement in an address at Milton Academy in Massachusetts on 17 May 1935. Frost’s work is formally more traditional than the work of the modernists, who had come up to prominence around the time of the Commencement World War. Frost favoured the sonnet, blank verse, rhyming couplets, and other established verse forms rather than
vers libre, which he saw every bit lacking any rules.

Writing free verse, and so, is like playing a game of tennis with no net: the artist, and the sportsperson, demand some kind of limit against which they can structure their ‘art’.

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the ane less travelled by’.

Let’s conclude this pick of the best Robert Frost quotations with i of his most famous of all, from the concluding stanza of his poem ‘The Route Not Taken’. The sentiment of these lines is often misunderstood: many readers interpret them every bit a rejection of a conformist approach to life.

Only in fact, at that place’south an air of regret in Frost’south words besides – he didn’t take the other road, and may be left wondering where that would have taken him – and also a suggestion of retrospectively engineering a particular narrative, a ‘story’ which justifies his determination to opt for one road over another. Frost’s quotation is, in other words, far deeper and more cryptic (and ambivalent) than it is usually taken to be.