Robert Frost: Philosophy and peculiarities of landscape poetry - Реферат

Robert Frost: Philosophy and peculiarities of landscape poetry Table of Contents Introduction 1. Robert Frost: life and work 2. Landscape in Frost’s poetry 3. Peculiarities of Robert Frost’s poems Conclusion Bibliography Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Introduction Robert Frost is one of the finest American poets. His works are very different from the works of other poets. When I first started reading his poems, I was surprised to find out how plain their language is: few metaphors, few epithets and comparisons. But later I understood that there is deep meaning behind this simplicity. For instance, “Fire and Ice” contains informal language without any means of expression. However, the author reflects on one of the subjects that had always agitated people’s minds: the world’s end. Every critic of Frost’s poetry has his own opinion of it. Some consider it plain and bucolic; and the others are amazed by philosophical subtext (like Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Edward Thomas - famous British poets, who were Robert Frost’s contemporaries). People are still discussing Frost’s poetry today, and there are many different points of view on this subject, that’s why it is a topical issue nowadays. The main subject of my paper is the peculiarities of Frost’s poems. The objective is to study Frost’s poems, try a hand in translating them and create my own verses in his style. To achieve this I have studied and analyzed Robert Frost’s poems, books about his work and critics’ reviews on his poems; made a comparative analysis of Frost’s poems in the original and their translations. This paper consists of the introduction, three chapters, conclusion, bibliography, and the appendix, that contains my translations of Robert Frost’s poems and my own ones in his style. Doing this research I studied books and articles both in English and Russian, translated some poems and sent them to the American Council Competition, on the results of which I’ve been awarded a certificate for “The best overall work”. 1. Robert Frost: life and work Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost, a journalist and a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. After the death of his father he moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts near his paternal grandfather. Frost wrote his first poems when he was a student in Lawrence High School. They were published in the school newspaper, and young Robert Frost soon became its editor. He was the head of his form. In 1894 Robert Frost’s poem My Butterfly was published in a New York magazine called The Independent. In the following year he married his ex-classmate Elinor White and they both worked as teachers. In 1897 Frost entered Harvard University, studied there for about two years and returned back to Lawrence because of problems with his lungs and family matters. In 1900 Frost’s grandfather bought him a farm in New Hampshire, where he wrote his first collection of poems - A Boy’s Will. In 1906 he became a teacher again. In 1912 Robert Frost and his family moved to England, where they lived near London. There he made acquaintances in the literary world, such as Frank Flint, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Edward Thomas (one of Frost’s best friends), who wrote reviews on his works. According to Robert Frost’s biographer William H. Pritchard, these critiques helped Frost to have a reputation of the leading American poet. He returned to this country in 1915 being a famous person. His publisher Henry Holt showed North of Boston to the Americans. Frost gained popularity after the publication of this book. At first he was invited to Tufts College as honorary speaker, the next year he was elected to the National institution of Art and literature. In 1915 Frost wrote Mountain Interval, including such things as The Road Not Taken, An Old Man’s Winter Night, The Oven Bird, Birches, Putting in the Seed and Out, Out -. His poems remained having a simple language, but started to assume Frost’s own intonation noticed by critics. Soon after that Robert Frost was invited to be a professor in Amherst College in Massachusetts, then in Michigan University, in Harvard, in Dartmouth. He also started reading his poems in public (he did this throughout his life and was extremely popular among his listeners).