When winter comes to New England, it is easy to bring to mind the name of Robert Frost. There is no more iconic winter New England poem that the one that begins,

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

And 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.

“Nevermore!” It might be difficult to end a poem on a more dramatic note than Edgar Allen Poe did in “The Raven.”  Can you name the poets who created these ending lines?  Bonus points for the name of the poem.

1.    Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

2.    My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

3.    and so cold

4.    And eternity in an hour

5.    Petals on a wet, black bough.

6.    Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes I wrote in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

2.    Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

3.    William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”

4.    William Blake, “To see a world in a grain of sand”

5.    Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

6.    Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

(If you’ve been following my Poem of the Day posts all month on my Facebook page or on Twitter, you should recognize several of these. All are worth reading. Or rereading!)

“Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,” wrote Robert Herrick, the 17^th Century English poet, to open a poem encouraging ladies to marry while they were young and beautiful (“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”).  This line of Herrick’s poem, which gained popularity as a song, is now an iconic admonition to enjoy our lives on Earth.  Now gather ye wits, and see how many of these famous first lines you can identify.

1.    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

2.    I, too, dislike it, there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle

3.    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks

4.    By the rude bridge that arched the flood

5.    Come live with me and be my love

6.    God moves in a mysterious way,

7.    Hog Butcher for the World

8.    Little Lamb, who made thee?

9.    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The answers are below. This quiz was adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

2.    Marianne Moore, “Poetry”

3.    Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

4.    Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

5.    Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

6.    William Cowper, “Light Shining Out of Darkness”

7.    Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

8.    William Blake, “The Lamb”

9.    Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

“April,” as T.S. Eliot told us, “is the cruellest month.”

It is also National Poetry Month. That idea was inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. So to test your poetic wits, a quick Pop Quiz on some famous first poetic lines… Then go read the whole poems.

“Let us go then, you and I.”  With this opening line, T.S. Eliot invites his reader into the mind of his uninspired, indecisive narrator in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A poem’s first line can set a scene, as Walt Whitman’s “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed” does.  Or it might intrigue the reader, as when Emily Dickinson writes, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” (Poem 465).

Who opened their poems with the famous lines below?  See how many poets you can identify.

1.    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

2.    anyone lived in a pretty how town

3.    Take up the White Man’s burden–

4.    ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

5.    In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn

6.    It so happens I am sick of being a man.

7.    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

This quiz is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers

1.    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnet 43.”

2.    e.e. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”

3.    Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden.”  This 1899 poem encouraged Americans to colonize the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies.

4.    Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

5.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Kahn.”

6.    Pablo Neruda, “Walking Around” (trans. Robert Bly).

7.    Allen Ginsberg, “Howl.”

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.

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 died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, the words above, etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Stop here a moment and take this Frost quiz.

1. In what city was Robert Frost born?
2. What Yankee saying does Frost’s neighbor repeat in the poem, “Mending Wall”?
3. Which President chose Frost to read a poem at his inauguration?
4. At that inauguration, why did Frost recite “The Gift Outright”?

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article

And this is a videoblog I made at Frost’s gravesite last August:
http://www.dontknowmuch.com/2009/08/touch-of-frost-a-videoblog/

This is the website of Frost House adn Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html
Answers
1. San Francisco, California.
2. “Good fences make good neighbors.”
3. John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
4. He had written a new poem called “Dedication,” but couldn’t read it in the January glare; instead, he recited the 1942 poem, which he knew by heart.