《英美文学教学资料》the road not taken.docVIP

Modernism(early 20thC-mid 20thC) the irrational, private, subjective; the psychological, the spiritual, the abnormal; the inner being, the psychic time, chaos; free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation; fragmentation, discontinuity, literary montage, juxtaposition, and the frenetic inter-penetration of passage to suggest a disordered simultaneity. 5. Robert Frost (1874-1963) Robert Frost, a poet of dignity, simplicity, and ambiguity, has proved to be one of the most popular American poets of the twentieth century. A four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Frost received special recognition by Congress in 1960 and the following January, at age eighty-six, had the honor of reciting at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Frost was born in San Francisco but in early youth returned with his family to the area of the country with which he is closely associated—New England. His mother, who wrote poetry herself, introduced him to the works of the English Romantic writers, the New England Transcendentalists, and the poets of her native Scotland. After briefly attending Dartmouth and Harvard colleges and working as a journalist and a schoolteacher, Frost purchased a farm in New Hampshire. Here, between farm chores, he began his career as a poet. Frost wrote not only of the natural world but also of his struggle to raise a family against a backdrop of financial hardship and of the bleak bouts of depression that would assail him all his life. In 1912, unable to get his poems published in America, he sold his farm and took his family to England. In London Frost became acquainted with Ezra Pound and his associates, and he was able to publish his first volume, A Boy’s Will, in 1913. Another volume, North of Boston, followed soon after. Through the influence of Pound and other critics, Frost became known on this side of the Atlantic, so that, by the time he returned to America in 1915, he was well on the road to fame. Despite the deb