Comparison Of Robert Frost's Life And Work

The great Robert Frost once said, “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” Many believe that he was a happy poet, writing about his experiences in nature. Upon closer inspection, the darker side of Frost becomes clear. He was fearful of many things in his life and they became evident in his poetry. However, he denied that there was any connection between his personal life and the work he made. When the public thinks about Robert Frost, they do not imagine a man afraid of the world, they imagine a man inspired about the beautiful places he’s seen, though through Robert Frost’s dark poetry, we can see his true nature.
Frost’s life began in March of 1874 when he was born to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost, Jr. Robert …show more content…
He believed that the design created for living was a design created for death. He believed that people need to make the most of what they had in life. He also believed that life and death consisted of struggle and violence, which made him think that the way a person handles violence, defines their character. He thought that, “the way we design it, tell it, conclude it reveals the extent to which we value form, purpose, and design” (Ingebretsen). Death was prevalent in Frost’s life and was one of the causes of his dark …show more content…
He echoes popular apocalyptic themes as much to control his own anxiety of endings as to parody the fears of others. Frost’s preoccupation with the intricacies of form was his response to anxieties that were in his life. To Frost, life was a long extended challenge of prowess, whose form he would come upon “later in the dark of life.” Many of the characters in Frost’s poems are quite lonely and dark. Frost’s characters live at the edges of things, whether it is cycles of nature, such as the ends of seasons, physical ends, such as dying or death itself, or metaphysical dead ends. The citizenry crafted by absence, whether broken or breaking marriages, fear, loneliness, or death. This is shown in the poems “Home Burial” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” Frost was always afraid that he resembled the characters in his poems too much, so he always strongly denied any link between his life and his poems. According to Edward Ingebretsen, Frost felt life to be a “tangle of unrounded conclusions, or a chain of incomplete and accidental moments.” Frost relied on the consolation of words to help bring order to the chaos he felt he lived in. Even though he actively denied any link of his characters to his life, evidence shows that the darkness his characters experience might have been what he was feeling at the time of his authorship.