14th week Robert Frost 英美文学赏析 教学课件.ppt

Robert Frost(1874--1963) Life and Writing Career Born in San Francisco, California, but he came of New England stock. His ancestors for nine generations lived in Massachusetts. Grandfather: a prudent, hard-working, successful Massachusetts farmer Father: rebelled so violently against the New England mores that he embraced the Confederate cause during the Civil War Mother: a school teacher In 1884, when he was 10 years old, his father died. Mother took him and his younger sister back to their Grandfather’s farm in New England where his mother taught to earn a living. A good student in high school A particular love for the Latin classics Frost entered college twice, once in Harvard University. Dropped out of college In 1895 , married his high school sweetheart Elinor Frost supplemented the inadequate proceeds收益 of his farming by several periods of school teaching and other odd jobs, but he was throughout determined to make a career of poetry. He taught and farmed for 12 years. Although he had had only five poems published by the time the ten year period had elapsed, his faith in himself remained unshaken and he determined on a bold or reckless venture---selling his farm and moving to England where he thought the climate for poetry might be better. Fortunately he very soon succeeded in meeting Ezra Pound. Nature and rural surroundings became for Frost a source for insights into deeper design of life. He once said: Literature begins with geography.  In 1912 Frost sold his farm and took his wife and four young children to England, where he published his first book of poems: A Boy’s Will at the age of 39. It was followed by the second collection of poems: North of Boston (1914), which gained international reputation. The collection contains some of Frosts best-known poems: Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, A Servant to Servants, After Apple-Picking, and The Wood-Pile. The poems, written with blank verse or looser free verse of dialogue,