Touch of Frost: A Videoblog
"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.
One of my favorite spots in Vermont is the Frost gravesite in the cemetery of the First Church in Old Bennington -just down the street from the Bennington Monument.
Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost's poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost's language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors.
But while poems like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death. Robert Frost –New England's poet of snowy woods, stone wall and apple trees.
I hope this "touch of Frost" will inspire you to read some of his work.
Here's a link to Robert Frost's page at Poets.org
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192
It includes an account of Frost and JFK
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20540
The first poet invited to speak at a Presidential inaugural, Frost told the new President:
"Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don't be afraid of power."
Hear Robert Frost for yourself at Poets Out Loud:
http://robertfrostoutloud.com
This link is to Middlebury College's online Frost exhibit
http://midddigital.middlebury.edu/local_files/robert_frost/index.html
This is the website of Frost House and Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html
Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world," etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.
Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article
This material is adapted from Don't Know Much About Literature written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.
