Frost’s poetry’s hidden layers When Robert Frost died in 1963, he was America’s best known poet. Much of his fame came from his inclusion in President John F. Kennedy’s televised inaugural address in 1961. After the address, he traveled to the Soviet Union and visited with Nikita Khrushchev. Not long after, in 1963, he died due to prostate surgery complications. Robert Frost’s life began in 1874 in San Francisco, California, but much of his life was spent in New England. Frost was a writer his entire life but, he wasn’t published until 1913. His poetry and books were well liked for their rural tones and he went on to receive four Pulitzer prizes. In his first book, A Boy’s Will, Frost learned to write using regional dialects. His second book, North of Boston, was even more grounded in rural scenes. Country poems filled with rural images gave Robert Frost a humble sage image that Americans loved, but also hid the dark layers to his writing and personality. Frost’s poems were filled with simple rural scenes, yet even his simplest poems hid much deeper meaning. “To Frost, the purposes of people and nature are never the …show more content…
On the surface, is the age-old doomsday question of how the Earth will perish. Will fire devour the Earth, as in a solar flare, or will ice freeze all life, as in a new Ice Age? History associates fire with Satan, yet the Ice Ages brought about mass extinctions. Frost’s meaning goes much deeper, though. Fire represents human temper and the excesses of passion. Frost says he would favor a passionate death. Ice represents the human mind, intelligence, and calculation. Frost says for a second death, he would have had enough of hatred and would want ice (Complete Poems of Robert Frost 268). Frost’s complex view is that both human passion and intelligence is