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Leonard Baskin (August 15, 1922 – June 3, 2000) was an American sculptor, book-illustrator, wood-engraver, printmaker, graphic artist, writer and teacher.

Life and work[link]

While he was a student at Yale University, he founded Gehenna Press, a small private press specializing in fine book production. From 1953 until 1974, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Subsequently Baskin also taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

He lived most of his life in the U.S., but spent nine years in Devon at Lurley Manor, Lurley, near Tiverton, close to his friend Ted Hughes, for whom he illustrated Crow. Sylvia Plath dedicated "Sculptor" to Leonard Baskin. It was the penultimate poem in The Colossus (1960).

His public commissions include a bas relief for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and a bronze statue of a seated figure, erected in 1994 for the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His works are owned by many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Vatican Museums. The archive of his work at the Gehenna Press was acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford, England, in 2009.

In 1955 he was one of eleven New York artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery. In 1966 he was featured in the documentary, "Images of Leonard Baskin" by American filmmaker Warren Forma. Leonard Baskin was a first cousin of American modern dancer and choreographer, Sophie Maslow. He died on June 3, 2000 at the age of 77. The Art Institute of Portland has a memorial to him.

Awards and honors[link]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966)^[1]
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Gold Medal of The American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Special Medal of Merit of the American Institute of Graphic Arts
• Gold Medal of the National Academy of Design

References[link]

• Central Conference of American Rabbis, “A Passover Haggadah, The New Union Haggadah with drawings by Leonard Baskin”, New York : Viking Press, 1982.
• Jaffe, Irma B., “The Sculpture of Leonard Baskin”, New York, Viking Press, 1980.

External links[link]

• Official website of Leonard Baskin & The Gehenna Press
• Galerie St. Etienne - Official gallery representative of the Estate of Leonard Baskin
• Exhibition at the Smith College Museum of Art: Medea & Her Sisters: Leonard Baskin's Images of Women
• Leonard Baskin & The Gehenna Press, 1951-1971
• Leonard Baskin & The Gehenna Press
• R.Michelson Galleries
• Bio
• Collection of Leonard Baskin etchings at Annex Galleries
• Leonard Baskin and the Gehenna Press collection at Brandeis University

Wilfred Owen
Born	(18 March 1893) Oswestry, Shropshire, England
Died	4 November 1918(1918-11-04) (aged 25) Sambre–Oise Canal, France
Nationality	English
Period	First World War
Genres	War poem
Influences Siegfried Sassoon, John Keats Horace

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and stood in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works — most of which were published posthumously — are "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting".

Early life[link]

Wilfred Owen was born the eldest of four children in a house near Oswestry in Shropshire called Plas Wilmot on 18 March 1893, of mixed English and Welsh ancestry. His siblings were Harold, Colin, and Mary Millard Owen. At that time, his parents, Thomas and Harriet Susan (Shaw) Owen, lived in a comfortable house owned by his grandfather but, on his death in 1897, the family was forced to move to lodgings in the back streets of Birkenhead. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School (now The Wakeman School), and discovered his vocation in 1903 or 1904 during a holiday spent in Cheshire. Owen was raised as an Anglican of the evangelical school, and in his youth was a devout believer, in part due to his strong relationship with his mother, which was to last throughout his life. His early influences included the "big six" of romantic poetry, particularly John Keats, and the Bible.

Shortly after leaving school in 1911, Owen passed the matriculation exam for the University of London, but not with the first-class honours needed for a scholarship (his studies suffered as Owen mourned the loss of his uncle and role model, Edgar Hilton in a hunting accident), which in his family's circumstances was the only way he could have afforded to attend.

In return for free lodging, and some tuition for the entrance exam, Owen worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading and as a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School. He then attended classes at University College, Reading (now the University of Reading), in botany and later, at the urging of the head of the English Department, free lessons in Old English. His time spent at Dunsden parish led him to disillusionment with the church, both in its ceremony and its failure to provide aid for those in need.

Prior to the outbreak of World War I, he worked as a private tutor teaching English and French at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France. There he met the older French poet Laurent Tailhade, with whom he later corresponded in French.^[1]

War service[link]

On 21 October 1915, he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles Officers' Training Corps. For the next seven months, he trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. On 4 June 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant (on probation) in the Manchester Regiment.^[2] Owen started the war as a cheerful and optimistic man, but he soon changed forever. Initially, he held his troops in contempt for their loutish behaviour, and in a letter to his mother described his company as "expressionless lumps".^[3] However, Owen's outlook on the war was to be changed dramatically after two traumatic experiences. Firstly, he was blown high into the air by a trench mortar, landing among the remains of a fellow officer. Soon after, he became trapped for days in an old German dugout. After these two events, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was while recuperating at Craiglockhart that he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, an encounter that was to transform Owen's life.

After a period of convalescence in Northern Ireland, then a short spell working as a teacher in nearby Tynecastle High School, he returned to light regimental duties. In March 1918, he was posted to the Northern Command Depot at Ripon.^[4] A number of poems were composed in Ripon, including "Futility" and "Strange Meeting". His 25th birthday was spent quietly in Ripon Cathedral.

After returning to the front, Owen led units of the Second Manchesters on 1 October 1918 to storm a number of enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt. However, only one week before the end of the war, whilst attempting to traverse a canal, he was shot in the head and killed. The news of his death, on 4 November 1918, was given to his mother on Armistice Day. For his courage and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross, an award he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet, but the award was not gazetted until 15 February 1919.^[5] The citation followed on 30 July 1919:

2nd Lt, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, 5th Bn. Manch. R., T.F., attd. 2nd Bn. For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.^[6]

Poetry[link]

Owen is regarded by historians as the leading poet of the First World War, known for his war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare. He had been writing poetry for some years before the war, himself dating his poetic beginnings to a stay at Broxton by the Hill, when he was ten years old.^[7] The Romantic poets Keats and Shelley influenced much of Owen's early writing and poetry. His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on Owen's poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems ("Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth") show direct results of Sassoon's influence. The novel Regeneration by Pat Barker shows this relationship closely. Manuscript copies of the poems survive, annotated in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's poetry would eventually be more widely acclaimed than that of his mentor. While his use of pararhyme, with its heavy reliance on assonance, was innovative, he was not the only poet at the time to use these particular techniques. He was, however, one of the first to experiment with it extensively.

His poetry itself underwent significant changes in 1917. As a part of his therapy at Craiglockhart, Owen's doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged Owen to translate his experiences, specifically the experiences he relived in his dreams, into poetry. Sassoon, who was becoming influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, aided him here, showing Owen through example what poetry could do. Sassoon's use of satire influenced Owen, who tried his hand at writing "in Sassoon's style". Further, the content of Owen's verse was undeniably changed by his work with Sassoon. Sassoon's emphasis on realism and "writing from experience" was contrary to Owen's hitherto romantic-influenced style, as seen in his earlier sonnets. Owen was to take both Sassoon's gritty realism and his own romantic notions and create a poetic synthesis that was both potent and sympathetic, as summarised by his famous phrase "the pity of war". In this way, Owen's poetry is quite distinctive, and he is, by many, considered a greater poet than Sassoon. Nonetheless, Sassoon contributed to Owen's popularity by his strong promotion of his poetry, both before and after Owen's death, and his editing was instrumental in the making of Owen as a poet.

Thousands of poems were published during the war, but very few of them had the benefit of such strong patronage, and it is as a result of Sassoon's influence, as well as support from Edith Sitwell and the editing of his poems into a new anthology in 1931 by Edmund Blunden that ensured his popularity, coupled with a revival of interest in his poetry in the 1960s which plucked him out of a relatively exclusive readership into the public eye. Though he had plans for a volume of verse, for which he had written a "Preface", he never saw his own work published apart from those poems he included in The Hydra, the magazine he edited at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and "Miners", which was published in The Nation.

There were many other influences on Owen's poetry, including his mother. His letters to her provide us with insight into Owen's life at the front, as well as the development of his philosophy regarding the war. Graphic details of the horror Owen witnessed were never spared. Owen's experiences with religion also heavily influenced his poetry, notably in poems such as "Anthem for Doomed Youth", in which the ceremony of a funeral is reenacted not in a church, but on the battlefield itself, and "At a Calvary near the Ancre", which comments on the Crucifixion of Christ. Owen's experiences in war led him to further challenge his religious beliefs, claiming in his poem "Exposure" that "love of God seems dying".

Literary output[link]

Only five of Owen's poems had been published before his death, one of which was in fragmentary form. His best known poems include "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility", "Dulce Et Decorum Est", "The Parable of the Old Men and the Young" and "Strange Meeting". Some of his poems feature in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.

Owen's full unexpurgated opus is in the academic two-volume work The Complete Poems and Fragments (1994) by Jon Stallworthy. Many of his poems have never been published in popular form.

In 1975 Mrs. Harold Owen, Wilfred's sister-in-law, donated all of the manuscripts, photographs and letters which her late husband had owned to the University of Oxford's English Faculty Library. As well as the personal artifacts this also includes all of Wilfred's personal library and an almost complete set of The Hydra — the magazine of Craiglockhart War Hospital. These can be accessed by any member of the public on application in advance to the English Faculty librarian.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds a large collection of Wilfred Owen's family correspondence.

Relationship with Sassoon[link]

Owen held Siegfried Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to his mother that he was "not worthy to light [Sassoon's] pipe". On being discharged from Craiglockhart, Owen was stationed on home-duty in Scarborough for several months, during which time he associated with members of the artistic circle into which Sassoon had introduced him, which included Robert Ross and Robert Graves. He also met H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and it was during this period he developed the stylistic voice for which he is now recognised. Many of his early poems were penned while stationed at the Clarence Garden Hotel, now the Clifton Hotel in Scarborough's North Bay. A blue tourist plaque on the hotel marks its association with Owen.

Robert Graves^[9] and Sacheverell Sitwell^[10] (who also personally knew him) have stated Owen was homosexual, and homoeroticism is a central element in much of Owen's poetry.^{[11][12][13][14]} Through Sassoon, Owen was introduced to a sophisticated homosexual literary circle which included Oscar Wilde's friend Robbie Ross, writer and poet Osbert Sitwell, and Scottish writer C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the translator of Proust. This contact broadened Owen's outlook, and increased his confidence in incorporating homoerotic elements into his work.^[15][16] Historians have debated whether Owen had an affair with Scott-Moncrieff in May 1918; Scott-Moncrieff had dedicated various works to a "Mr W.O.",^[17] but Owen never responded.^[18]

The account of Owen's sexual development has been somewhat obscured because his brother, Harold Owen, removed what he considered discreditable passages in Owen's letters and diaries after the death of their mother.^[19] Owen also requested that his mother burn a sack of his personal papers in the event of his death, which she did. Andrew Motion wrote of Owen's relationship with Sassoon: "On the one hand, Sassoon's wealth, posh connections and aristocratic manner appealed to the snob in Owen: on the other, Sassoon's homosexuality admitted Owen to a style of living and thinking that he found naturally sympathetic. ^[20]

Death[link]

Owen's grave (centre), in Ors communal cemetery

In July 1918, Owen returned to active service in France, although he might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely. His decision was almost wholly the result of Sassoon's being sent back to England. Sassoon, who had been shot in the head in a so-called friendly fire incident, was put on sick-leave for the remaining duration of the war. Owen saw it as his patriotic duty to take Sassoon's place at the front, that the horrific realities of the war might continue to be told. Sassoon was violently opposed to the idea of Owen returning to the trenches, threatening to "stab [him] in the leg" if he tried it. Aware of his attitude, Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again in France.

Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration. He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery.^[21] There are memorials to Wilfred Owen at Gailly,^[22] Ors,^[23] Oswestry,^[24] Birkenhead (Central Library) and Shrewsbury.^[25]

On 11 November 1985, Owen was one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.^[26] The inscription on the stone is taken from Owen's "Preface" to his poems: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."^[27] There is also a small museum dedicated to Owen and Sassoon at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, now a Napier University building.

The forester's house in Ors where Owen spent his last night, Maison forestière de l'Ermitage, has been transformed by Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson into a white sculptured memorial to Owen and his poetry, which opened to the public on 1 October 2011.^[28]

Depictions in popular culture[link]

Pat Barker's 1991 historical novel Regeneration describes the meeting and relationship between Sassoon and Owen,^[29] acknowledging that, from Sassoon's perspective, the meeting had a profoundly significant effect on Owen. Owen's treatment with his own doctor, Arthur Brock, is also touched upon briefly. Owen's death is described in the third book of Barker's Regeneration trilogy, The Ghost Road.^[30] In the 1997 film he was played by Stuart Bunce.^[31] The play Not About Heroes by Stephen MacDonald also takes as its subject matter the friendship between Owen and Sassoon, and begins with their meeting at Craiglockhart during World War I.^[32] Owen was mentioned as a source of inspiration for one of the correspondents in the epistolary novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.^[33]

Owen is the subject of the 2007 BBC docudrama Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale, in which he is played by Samuel Barnett.^[34] His poetry has been reworked into various formats, such as The Ravishing Beauties' recording of Owen's poem "Futility" in an April 1982 John Peel session.^[35] Benjamin Britten incorporated nine of Owen's poems into his War Requiem, opus 66, along with words from the Latin Mass for the Dead (Missa pro Defunctis). The Requiem was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, and first performed there on 30 May 1962.^[36] A screen adaptation was made by Derek Jarman in 1988, with the 1963 recording as the soundtrack.^[37]

In 1982, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" was set to music and recorded by the 10,000 Maniacs in Fredonia, New York. The recording appeared on their first EP release Human Conflict Number Five and later on the compilation Hope Chest. The song is unique in the oeuvre of the group as the poem is sung by guitarist John Lombardo, not lead singer Natalie Merchant (who sings back-up vocals on the track). Also in 1982, singer Virginia Astley set the poem "Futility" to music she had composed.^[38]

References[link]

External links[link]

	Poetry portal
	biography portal

England portal

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Wilfred Owen

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wilfred Owen

• Works by Wilfred Owen at Project Gutenberg
• Profile and poems at Poets.org
• The Wilfred Owen Collection, in The First World War Poetry Digital Archive by Oxford University
• The Wilfred Owen resource page at warpoetry.co.uk
• Wilfred Owen at BBC Poetry Season
• Selected Poetry of Wilfred Owen – Biography and 7 poems (Anthem for Doomed Youth, Arms and the Boy, Dulce et Decorum Est, Exposure, Futility, Spring Offensive, Strange Meeting)
• Selected Poems at Poetseers
• Wilfred Owen Association
• Details of Wilfred Owen's burial place (Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
• Owen Profile
• Lost Poets of the Great War, a hypertext document on the poetry of World War I by Harry Rusche, of the English Department, Emory University, Atlanta GA.

Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1941)
Born	Robert Lee Frost (1874-03-26)March 26, 1874 San Francisco, California, United States
Died	January 29, 1963(1963-01-29) (aged 88) Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Poet, playwright
Notable work(s)	A Boy's Will, North of Boston
Influences Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, John Keats
Influenced Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, Edward Thomas
Signature

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.^[1] 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. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of his generation, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Robert Frost, circa 1910

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie.^[1] His mother was of Scottish descent, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.^{[citation needed]}

Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892.^[2] Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.

Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs – including helping his mother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering newspapers, and working in a factory as an arclight carbon filament changer. He did not enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry.

Adult years[link]

Frost, 1959

In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of the New York Independent) for $15 - equivalent in spending power to at least $300 today. Proud of his accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married at Lawrence, Massachusetts on December 19, 1895.(Thompson and Meyers)

Frost attended Harvard University from 1897–1899, but he left voluntarily due to illness.^[3][4][5] Shortly before dying, Robert's grandfather purchased a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field of education as an English teacher at New Hampshire's Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, settling first in Beaconsfield, a small town outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Although Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work, Frost later resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American prosody. Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (A Boy's Will) and 1914 (North of Boston).

The Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where he wrote many of his poems, including "Tree at My Window" and "Mending Wall."

As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915 and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938. It is maintained today as The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference site. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College in Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the myriad sounds and intonations of the spoken English language in their writing. He called his colloquial approach to language "the sound of sense." ^[6]

In 1924, he won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for the book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. He would win additional Pulitzers for Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937, and A Witness Tree in 1943.^[7]

The Frost family grave in Bennington Old Cemetery

For forty-two years – from 1921 to 1963 - Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, at its mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927; while there he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters.^[8] The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home is now situated at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Frost returned to Amherst in 1927. In 1940 he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.^[9] His property also includes a dwelling on Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that today belongs to the National Historic Register.

Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates Frost received an honorary degree there. Although he never graduated from college, Frost received over 40 honorary degrees, including ones from Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge universities; and was the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, the Robert L. Frost School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the main library of Amherst College were named after him.

Frost was 86 when he performed a reading of his well-known poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. He died in Boston two years later, on January 29, 1963, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes a line from one of his poems: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

One of the original collections of Frost materials, to which he himself contributed, is found in the Special Collections department of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. The collection consists of approximately twelve thousand items, including original manuscript poems and letters, correspondence and photographs, as well as audio and visual recordings.^[10] The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a small collection of his papers. The most significant collection of Frost's working manuscripts is held by Dartmouth.

Critical response[link]

This article contains too many or too-lengthy quotations for an encyclopedic entry. Please help improve the article by editing it to take facts from excessively quoted material and rewrite them as sourced original prose. Consider transferring direct quotations to Wikiquote. (March 2012)

The poet/critic Randall Jarrell often praised Frost's poetry and wrote the following appraisal of Frost's career:

Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot, seems to me the greatest of the American poets of this century. Frost's virtues are extraordinary. No other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech. It is hard to overestimate the effect of this exact, spaced-out, prosaic movement, whose objects have the tremendous strength. . .of things merely put down and left to speak for themselves. . .Frost's seriousness and honesty; the bare sorrow with which, sometimes, things are accepted as they are, neither exaggerated nor explained away; the many, many poems in which there are real people with their real speech and real thought and real emotion—all this, in conjunction with so much subtlety and exactness. . .makes the reader feel that he is not in a book but a world. . .When you know Frost's poems, you know surprisingly well what the world seemed to one man. The grimness and awfulness, and untouchable sadness of things, both in the world and in the self, have justice done to them in the poems. . .but no more justice than is done to the tenderness and love and delight; and everything in between is respresented somewhere too.^[11]

U.S stamp, 1974

Jarrell's notable and influential essays on Frost include the essays "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial'" (1962), which consisted of an extended close reading of that particular poem, and "To The Laodiceans" (1952) in which Jarrell defended Frost against critics who had accused Frost of being too "traditional" and out of touch with Modern or Modernist poetry. In Frost's defense, Jarrell wrote "the regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications--coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his work." And Jarrell's close readings of poems like "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep" led to readers and critics to perceive more of the complexities in Frost's poetry.^[12][13]

In an introduction to Jarrell's book of essays, Brad Leithauser notes that, "the 'other' Frost that Jarrell discerned behind the genial, homespun New England rustic—the 'dark' Frost who was desperate, frightened, and brave—has become the Frost we've all learned to recognize, and the little-known poems Jarrell singled out as central to the Frost cannon are now to be found in most anthologies." ^[14][15]

Jarrell lists a selection of which Frost poems he considers the most masterful, including "The Witch of Coös," "Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," "Directive," "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep," "Provide, Provide," "Acquainted with the Night," "After Apple Picking," "Mending Wall," "The Most of It," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "To Earthward," "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Spring Pools," "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers," "Design," [and] "Desert Places."^[16]

In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair write the following assessment of Frost's style:

The poetry of Frost has some kinship with that of Robinson in its choice of a New England setting and in its attempt to be true to the peculiarities of the region. But Frost's idiom is much less literary, and here he seems to have learned a little from Hardy and from Yeats's peasant plays. But even his earliest poems show a successful striving for utter colloquialism. This did not entail any surrender to form; he prided himself, for all his country accents, on being close to his favorite Latin poet Horace in the way his poem were chiseled out. Free verse was like playing tennis without a net, he [famously] said. To secure his effect Frost emptied his verse of any hint of the grand manner; John Crowe Ransom has remarked that he was startled during his own boyhood to discover that Frost's poetry had no kings or queens in it. Certainly the revival of Arthurian materials by his compatriot Robinson struck Frost as absurd. He prided himself, too, on staying close to earth, and objected to what he called "Platonism" in poetry, an insistence on essence without matter.^[17]

In providing an overview of Frost's style, the Poetry Foundation succinctly describes Frost's unique place in modern American letters:

In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor point out in Poems for Study, "Frost's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental. . .[Instead] Frost took up nineteenth-century tools and made them new. Lawrence Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content" work to a poet's advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalist's burden—the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures.^[18]

Personal life[link]

Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. In 1885 when Frost was 11, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with just eight dollars. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently 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.^[8]

Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (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 after 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 problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.^[8]

Selected works[link]

Poems[link]

Poetry collections[link]

• North of Boston (David Nutt, 1914; Holt, 1914)
  • "Mending Wall"
• Mountain Interval (Holt, 1916)
  • "The Road Not Taken"
• Selected Poems (Holt, 1923)

Includes poems from first three volumes and the poem The Runaway

• New Hampshire (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924)
• Several Short Poems (Holt, 1924)[2]
• Selected Poems (Holt, 1928)
• West-Running Brook (Holt, 1928? 1929)
• The Lovely Shall Be Choosers, The Poetry Quartos, printed and illustrated by Paul Johnston (Random House, 1929)
• Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1930; Longmans, Green, 1930)
• The Lone Striker (Knopf, 1933)
• Selected Poems: Third Edition (Holt, 1934)
• Three Poems (Baker Library, Dartmouth College, 1935)
• The Gold Hesperidee (Bibliophile Press, 1935)
• From Snow to Snow (Holt, 1936)
• A Further Range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
• Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1939; Longmans, Green, 1939)
• A Witness Tree (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943)
• Come In, and Other Poems (1943)
• Steeple Bush (Holt, 1947)
• Complete Poems of Robert Frost, 1949 (Holt, 1949; Cape, 1951)
• Hard Not To Be King (House of Books, 1951)
• Aforesaid (Holt, 1954)
• A Remembrance Collection of New Poems (Holt, 1959)
• You Come Too (Holt, 1959; Bodley Head, 1964)
• In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)
• The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York, 1969)
• A Further Range (published as Further Range in 1926, as New Poems by Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
• Nothing Gold Can Stay
• What Fifty Said
• Fire And Ice
• A Drumlin Woodchuck

Plays[link]

• A Way Out: A One Act Play (Harbor Press, 1929).
• The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).
• A Masque of Reason (Holt, 1945).
• A Masque of Mercy (Holt, 1947).

Prose[link]

• The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963; Cape, 1964).
• Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, by Margaret Bartlett Anderson (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).
• Selected Letters of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
• Interviews with Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966; Cape, 1967).
• Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost (State University of New York Press, 1972).
• Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship (University Press of New England, 1981).
• The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen (Harvard University Press, January 2007). [3]

Omnibus volumes[link]

• Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (Richard Poirier, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-883011-06-2.

Spoken word[link]

• Robert Frost Reads His Poetry, Caedmon Records, 1957, TC1060

Pulitzer Prizes[link]

• 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes
• 1931 for Collected Poems
• 1937 for A Further Range
• 1943 for A Witness Tree