Robert Frost

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade August 2001

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Robert Frost was born in California in 1873. At the age of ten, Frost moved cross-country to the New England town of Massachusetts. Here Frost encountered the unique environment of the northeast. The New England environment was a sharp contrast to the warm, sunny and sandy atmosphere of California. The experiences Frost had with the poor soil, mountainous granite, and dense woods (Bloom 6) helped Frost to learn to make nature speak with a human voice. In his poetry, Robert Frost uses nature as a symbol of rural life, human emotion and God in his poems.

Rural life is a major part of Frost's poetry. Andrea Defusco said that Frost "draws upon the feeling that rural life is representative of human life in general"� (66). In his poems, Frost never strays from his New England background, telling only of his own experiences in the rural world (Gerber 60). These included owning a dairy farm in New England, and living in rural England.

Frost wrote many poems about his farm life, such as "The Need of Being Versed In Country Things,"� "Out, Out "","� and "The Pasture."� In "The Need of Being Versed In Country Things,"� Frost speaks of an old farmhouse that has burnt down, with the brick chimney standing "Like a pistil after the petals go."� In "Out, Out-,"� Frost tells of a farm boy doing his chores. In "The Pasture,"� Frost speaks of raking leaves in the pasture and ""¦Going out to fetch the little calf"¦"� In "Putting in the Seed,"� Frost tells of planting beans and waiting for them to sprout out of the earth. His effort to maintain a rural atmosphere in his poetry is countered by Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods"� which "describes details which seem to point everywhere beyond the rural world"�...