Robert Frost -- Life Issues and Parallels Essay

Robert Frost -- Life Issues and Parallels to My Life

A Life Filled with Tragic Inspiration

Robert Frost was a prolific American writer and poet whose work captured the difficulties some of the most challenging periods in modern American history as well as his personal trials and tribulations. Frost's work is known for the eloquence that he was able to express using the simple language of common colloquial speech (Holman & Snyder, 2012). His father, a hard-drinking disciplinarian and journalist, died at the age of thirty-six from the consequences of excessive drinking when Frost was a child. His adult life was also marred by a long string of personal tragedies, such as in the loss of two of his six children in infancy and of his favorite child, his daughter, Marjorie, after delivering her first child. Only four years later, his wife, Elinor, suffered a sudden fatal heart attack, followed two years later by the suicide of his son, Carol. Still another child, Irma, had to be institutionalized for the same type of mental disorders as his sister, Jeannie, and Frost himself suffered lifelong bouts of clinical depression (Holman & Snyder, 2012). Frost proved unsuccessful as a farmer and tradesman but his writing was recognized as worthwhile while he was still in high school (Thompson, 1995).

Much of his work, including the dark poem A Witness Tree undoubtedly had their origins in the sadness Frost had experienced in connection with his many tragic losses. Frost nearly committed suicide as a very young man after the initial rejection of his first proposal of marriage to Elinor.They had both written poetry that was published in their school paper and had been co-valedictorians in high school, also pledging their mutual love and intention to be together afterwards (Thompson, 1995). Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College before returning home, although it is unclear whether he was expelled or left of his own volition after just one semester (King, 2009).

Frost worked as a lamp maker before taking a grade school teaching position near Elinor's college. After his first professional success as writer when the Independent, a New York magazine, purchased his poem, "My Butterfly" An Elegy," he produced two-homemade copies of his collected work, then five poems and then showed up unannounced at Elinor's school, Lawrence College, bearing two copies of his first book, a collection of those five poems entitled Twilight, intending to give one copy to Elinor together with his proposal of marriage. When she accepted the book (and Frost's visit) without any enthusiasm and rejected his marriage proposal, he reacted by tearing up his remaining copy on his walk home and, it is now believed, contemplating suicide, although that would only be revealed by Frost in old age and cryptically, through his poem Kitty Hawk, ostensibly about the Wright Brothers and their historic achievement at the field by that name (King, 2009).

Elinor had said that she rejected his proposal primarily because she wanted to complete her college education first but Frost apparently….....