American Literature (E-C-303)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: American literature (E-C-303)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Road Not Taken

Ø  Robert Lee Frost was born in March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California, United States. Ha was died in January 29, 1963 (aged 88) in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

Ø  He was an American Poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet. Frost was honored frequented by during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer prizes for poetry.

Ø  His personal life was played with grief and loss. In 1885 when frost was 11, his father died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had t commit his younger sister Jeanie to a Mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness Opportunity ran in Frost’s family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost’s wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.

Ø  Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son (1896-1904, died of cholera); daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899-1983); son Carol (1902-1940 committed suicide); daughter Irma (1903-1967) daughter Marjorie (1905-1934, died as a result of puerperal fever often childbirth) and daughter Elinor Bettina (died just three days after her birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frost’s wife, who had heart problem throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure in 1938.

Ø  A selected bibliography:

A Boy’s Will (1916), North of Boston (1914), Mountain Interval (1916), New Hampshire (1923), West-Running Brook (1928), The Lovely Shall be choosers (1929), The Lone Striker (1933), From snow to snow (1936), A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), Come In, and other poem (1943), Masque of Reason (1945), Steeple Bush (1947), hard not to be king(1951).   

Ø  The Road Not Taken is one of the finest and the most popular of the lyrics, published in 1916 in the volume of poems entitled Mountain Interval. It is one of those lyrics which combine “inner lyric vision and the outer contemplative narration.” The poet’s imagination is set at work by the difficulty of choosing one of the two roads. Which diverge of a particular point, and he comments on the difficulty and significance of making a choice is a very significant theme in Frost’s poetry, and it is also the theme of the present poem.

Ø  The Road Not Taken is a poem which has been much admired and much- quoted, as well as much misunderstood and criticized. It is a great lyric which records a personal experience of the poet but from the personal and individual, the poet soon rises to the universal and the general. The poet’s experience becomes symbolic of human experience in all ages and countries. The difficulty of making a choice is a universal one, and in this way the lyric is true to universal of the lyric. “He regards it as the work of a spiritual drifter one who fails to make a definite choice. He writes, The Road Not Taken, for example, is the poem of a man whom one might fairly call a spiritual drifter; and a spiritual drifter unlikely to have either the intelligence or the energy to become a major poet. Yet the poem has definite virtues, and these should not be over looked. In the first place, spiritual drifter exist, they are real; and although their decisions may not be comprehensible. The poem renders the experience of such a person, and renders the uncertain melancholy of his plight. Had Frost been a more intelligent man, he might have seen that the plight of the spiritual drifter was not inevitable; he might have written a greater poem. But his poem is good as far as it goes; the trouble is that it does not go far enough it is incomplete, and it puts on the reader the burden of critical intelligence which ought to be borne by the poet.”

      The language of the lyric is characterized by simplicity, clarity, and epigrammatic force and terseness. There are four stanzas each of five lines. Each line consists of eight syllables, through variations have been skillfully introduced to impart the informality and casualness of the spoken tongue. It is a personal lyric and as such it does not have the parenthesis the dashes, the pauses and ejaculations which characterize the dramatic lyrics.

Conclusion: It was grassy and wanted wear grass on it had worn out by human feet. This showed that it was less frequented than the other one.

The passing there- the people travelling that way.

Somewhere ages and ages hence- in times to come; in the distant future.