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Robert Frost, 1874-1963
Robert Frost was one of the few modern American poets who combined critical with popular acclaim. His best poetry was written in the 1920s and 1930s, as America was discovering its national and regional histories. Frost's poems about rural life in New England-"West Running Brook" and "Birches," for example-struck a chord because they were readable, yet imbued with larger questions about human nature, mortality, and man's fate. Frost liked to play the naive rustic, but he was a dedicated craftsman and America's last great formalist poet. Criticizing modern poetry, he said that writing poems without structure was like "playing tennis without a net."
Walker Hancock, 1969 cast after 1950 original |