Robert Frost – Life and Achievements

Throughout history, influential writers have been acknowledged and been credited for all of the works they have written. In American literature since the Civil War, writers such as E. E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway have all become well known for their inspiring works during this time. Each and every writer throughout this period offers important aspects of American literature that individuals can learn from. One individual that really struck me as important to today, as well as important in the past, is Robert Frost.

Credited author, Robert Frost, was a modernist who is known for his influential poems during the late 19th and early 20th century. Frost wrote poems in different and new ways that the public had never seen before. His poems, while they were set in the modern time frame, had somewhat of a traditional view. Frost used simple language that wasn't necessarily optimistic, which, in his mind, gives the readers a chance to organize their own thoughts about the poem. Unlike other modernist poets, Frost used traditional meter and rhyme. Because Frost lived in the countryside, natural images make up the majority of his writings. Frost kept traditional aspects of poetry in his poems, but most of the pieces were publicly viewed as modern. Frost was merely caught between two movements: the traditional movement and the modernist movement in poetry.

Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken and Fire and Ice are two prime examples of modernism with a simplistic view. These two poems have a deeper meaning into which the importance of the poem can be seen. Most of Frost's poems allow the reader to decide the meaning of the poem, but in his poem The Road Not Taken, Frost describes a man faced with a choice of two roads to travel. He doesn't know where either road might lead, but in order to continue on his journey, he can only pick one road. He looks at both roads for the possibilities of where they may take him in his travels. But regardless of his choice, he knows that he will miss the experiences he might have encountered on the road that he chooses not to take.

The Road Not Taken is a poem that allows the reader to learn important life lessons about the choices people make in this world. The drama of the poem is of the person making a choice between the two roads. As humans, we should be able to make choices, but the poem suggests that our choices are irrational and aesthetic. The poem offers an insight into just how cruel the world can be. It expresses the idea that choices in life are going to be hard, but in the end, making a choice is inevitable.

The poem Fire and Ice by Frost uses simplistic language in order to portray the significant meaning of hatred and desire. The poem says the world will end with fire and at the same time with ice. But in this poem, I think that ""Fire"" and ""Ice"" are symbols of two different sides of a human. With fire being the passionate side with ice as the rational side. Our ""passions"" help us define our human nature, and our reason helps makes us humans.

Frost's modernistic thoughts can be tied directly to the modernism that we cover towards the end of the semester. I think Frost's way of incorporating modernism into traditional views that society's already aware of, is interestingly smart.

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