1 Content Introduction

Chapter II. Philosophy of Robert Frost 
2.1 Frost - folk poet 
 
Robert Frost is a poet, philosopher, humanist, already recognized as a classic 
of American literature during his lifetime. Possessing rare popularity for the poets 
of this country, crowned with all the signs of official recognition, revered by young 
people, Robert Frost is one of those masters whose voice seems emphatically quiet, 
the verse does not shine with novelty, and the strength of the impact of creativity is 
determined by sincerity, the ability to penetrate the essence of at first glance the 
most ordinary phenomena. In the midst of the upheavals of the century, wars and 
revolutions, Frost simply and thoughtfully talked with the same person, his reader, 
about quite unpretentious, but truly eternal things: about nature, love, friendship, 
life, prosaic details of rural life - whether it be haymaking, harvesting or building a 
new barn. Kindness to people, humanity, accessibility, which has nothing to do 
with the desire for cheap popularity, are the most attractive features of Frost's 
poetry . The son of a farmer, he forever retained a connection with the people and 
nature of New England, which he sang in his poems. 
But this " regionality ", "local flavor" did not prevent Frost from becoming a 
poet of national significance, talking about phenomena of universal significance. 
He released the first collection - "The Will of the Boy" - rather late, when he was 
forty years old. This collection was followed at intervals of 3-5 years by eight more 
books of poetry; the last - "On the clearing" (1962) - was released a year before the 
death of the poet. All this time, Frost lived mainly on his farm in Vermont, where 
the work of a modest countryman became as natural to him as writing poetry; in 
the winter, he sometimes led poetry seminars with university students. 
Robert Frost wrote in classical meters, avoiding the free verse so popular in 
the West: a certain traditionalism makes Frost even somewhat old-fashioned. But 
behind the external unpretentiousness of his poems lies the richness of the inner 
content, the variety of shades of mood. A master of small form, he makes it 
exceptionally capacious: here is a landscape sketch, and philosophical reflection, 

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and a subtly conveyed episode of everyday life, and a small short story in verse. 
Although the world seems harmonious and whole to Frost , the poet does not pass 
by social problems. He writes about hardened property owners (“Mending the 
Wall”), and about the bitter fate of rural farm laborers (“Death of a Farm Farmer”), 
and about racial prejudice (“The Last Indian”). Loving his country, he welcomes 
the progress of mankind ("Science Fiction"), affirms the right of every nation to 
choose its own destiny, glorifies peace on earth. 
Frost's poetic manner is that the episodes of everyday human activity 
invariably receive from him a multi-layered philosophical and metaphysical 
comprehension (" After Apple-Picking ", " Birches "). Continuing Browning's 
tradition of dramatic monologue, Frost introduces poetic dialogue filled with 
colloquial intonations and subtle psychologism (" The Black Cottage ", " Home 
Burial " is the subject of Brodsky's essay). 
Frost appears to be fundamentally incomprehensible and alien to man, and 
often fraught with an immanent threat (" Stopping By Woods On A Snowy 
Evening "- the most textbook poem of American poetry of the 20th century.) The 
results of human activity are lost in the infinity and meaninglessness of the 
surrounding world (" The Wood-Pile ", " The Most of It "). 
One of the main poems by R. Frost , who defines him as a poet of the 
American people, is the famous “Come in!” / “ Come in ", which at first , like his 
rest of his work, did not attract public attention, but after the work was printed in a 
large number of copies and sent to war, it received great recognition and this poem 
is the beginning of Frost's success
1
. 
Unfortunately, the harmony and internal consistency of this scheme is 
achieved by ignoring or rather arbitrary, a priori interpretation of many facts of 
Frost's life and work , replacing the real context with the most conceptually 
favorable one. Examples of this will be given in the main part of this work, with a 
1
Фрост Р,, Черный дом (пер.Д.А.Прияткина). "Памир", 1981, № 7, с.84-86. 

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more specific consideration of various aspects of the concept of A.M. Zverev , 
which had to be resorted to mainly for polemical purposes
1
. 
Frost realized his poetic vocation late. Coming from a farming environment, 
for many years he combined peasant labor with the activities of a rural teacher. He 
published his first collection of poems, The Will of a Boy (1913), when he was in 
his fortieth year. The book was named after a line from G. Longfellow; the title 
expressed the idea, familiar to romantic poetry, that youth is fleeting, but the 
memory of it is indelible. Frost's orientation towards the romantic tradition (both 
American and English - he felt himself the heir of J. Keats and P. B. Shelley) 
sharply singled him out among his poetic peers, who perceived the poetry of 
romanticism as a deeply outdated phenomenon and were carried away by the idea 
of innovation, which for them correlated either with Whitman's free verse or with 
the experiments of the European avant-garde. 
In contrast, Frost preferred the “traditional way of being new”, believing that 
the verse systems and genres that are most common in classical English-language 
poetry have inexhaustible pictorial possibilities, and the poet’s material is always 
the same, no matter how the external forms of life change. . Starting with the book 
"North of Boston" (1914), which brought him wide popularity, Frost has always 
acted as an adherent of poetry, saturated with echoes of real life contradictions and 
containing recognizable pictures of everyday life, which for him contained a high 
philosophical meaning. Recreating the life of nature and the course of village 
everyday life with their seeming monotony, Frost found deep drama in this 
monotonous chronicle. His books New Hampshire (1923), Westward Stream 
(1928), Far Horizon (1936) and others, up to the last collection, In the Clearing 
(1962), are imbued with restrained lyricism and “feeling sadness that does not call 
for any consolation”, since consolations are impossible when it comes to the 
fragility of being, the ephemeral nature of high moral ideals that are unable to curb 
the egoistic impulses that create an abyss of alienation between people, the 
1
Богомолов А.С. Буржуазная философия США XX века. М., Мысль, 1994, 343 с. 

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vanished harmony of the relationship between man and nature, and the ultimate 
incomprehensibility of the laws of the universe. These themes and motifs remained 
dominant throughout Frost's career . With each new book, his reputation as a poet 
of a philosophical warehouse, at the same time endowed with a unique lyrical gift, 
was strengthened. 
The main genres of Frost's poetry were the ballad (often based on folklore 
legend), dramatic monologue and elegy. A special place in his work is occupied by 
meditative poems, in which an emphatically ordinary situation (as, for example, in 
"Birches", which speaks of boys climbing flexible young branches in order to, 
bending them, soar upwards, like on a swing) becomes an occasion for reflections 
on ineradicable human hopes and the recurring sad lessons of real experience. 
Unlike the romantics, Frost , as a rule, is alien to confessional lyrics, which 
convey insights and catastrophes experienced by the poet. He seeks to talk not 
about the conflict between the lyrical hero and the surrounding world, not about 
the tension of these relations, but about attempts to build them as harmonious - 
contrary to the objective logic of social life. Ultimately, the impossibility of such 
harmony is revealed , and, realizing this, the hero of Frost's lyrics experiences 
bitterness, and sometimes suffering, which, however, never develops into a feeling 
of loneliness and God-forsakenness , is not expressed in reproaches thrown to an 
indifferent and hostile world. Frost defined his position as “a love quarrel with 
being”: quite serious, but not growing into antagonism. 
Describing his worldview , Frost said: “The only thing I am decidedly 
incapable of is experiencing a state of hopelessness.” His work was perceived as a 
challenge to the "poetry of despair", which became the prevailing trend in the years 
after the First World War, and as the personification of archaism, fundamentally 
rejecting artistic pursuits marked by the spirit of experimentation . Frost, in fact, 
remained far from these searches, declaring that poetry written in vers libre is the 
same for him as playing tennis without a net. But his creative conservatism did not 
prevent a significant renewal of forms and genres that have a long history. 

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Insisting that a poem is possible only within the “strict boundaries of the 
logical” and rejecting “ non-targeted associations”, which, in his opinion, were 
only a “tribute to sonority” and not a way to embody new content, Frost at the 
same time spoke of the “greatest freedom of speech and image” within these limits. 
He substantiated the idea of the organic fusion of all components of the poem, the 
purpose of which is to achieve, with external restraint, a powerful emotional effect. 
Frost likened the great poems to ice in a frying pan: the melting remains invisible, 
but it is getting stronger with every second, and the water is bubbling more and 
more actively, looked at by those standing at the stove. 
In 1962, on behalf of President Kennedy Frost , when he was 88 years old, 
visited the USSR on a goodwill mission. His trip was one of the evidence of a thaw 
in relations between the US and the Soviet Union.