Robert Frost as a poet of man or common man

Evaluate Frost as a poet of man or common man.

A poet of nature is a poet of man. Like Wordsworth of England, Frost (1874-1963) of America is such a poet that means a poet of nature. Frost’s treatment of nature is new and unique as well. His poetry lives with a particular aliveness because it expresses living people.

Sketch of human characters: Frost has drawn sketches of human characters in many of his poems. They are marked with fineness and variety. Though his scope of the world of human characters is limited, he moves about artistically and displays an astonishing variety. The method of presenting the characters is as various as the characters themselves. For example, “The Road Not Taken” depicts the split personality of the speaker.

Analysis of human psychology: Based on the psychological analysis, the characters represented by Frost can be divided into two categories.

• The normal and well-adjusted characters
• The abnormal and the neurotic characters

Frost, the only poet in the history of English literature, has gained myriad human psychology in poetry. He is totally different from Robert Browning of England because Browning has sketched characters that rest on success or failure. On the other hand, Frost has created characters based on mentality. For instance, in the poem “Mending Wall,” we get two characters who are neurotic and well-adjusted. The speaker of the poem is a young, normal one, but the old neighbor is a neurotic one who comments:

Good fences make good neighbour

Thus, in many of his poems, including “Home Burial,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Death of Hired Man,” and so on, Frost has shown his mastery in the analysis of human psychology.

Intimate and personal knowledge of the New Englanders: Frost is called a local and regional poet because of his deep passion for his local and regional countryside and deep observation of the mentality of the people of New England, the northeastern region of the United States of America comprising six states.

According to the critics, Frost has similarities with Wordsworth regarding local and regional knowledge only. No other poet of English literature has as deep knowledge as Frost of the local people. One of the famous collections of poetry is “North of Boston,” published in 1914, in which all the characters of his poems are from New England.

The conflict of the human heart: Frost is called a poet of the common man because of his profound analytical knowledge of the conflict of the human heart. One of the best readable poems is “The Road not Taken,” which illustrates the conflict of the human heart of the split speaker. The speaker is confused and puzzled by the two diversified roads before him. This character symbolically represents all human hearts.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Frost is a poet of ordinary human beings, much like Wordsworth. Above all, his humans are not idealized but real. He has drawn all these portraits with the sympathy and tenderness of feelings of a great poet.