Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire (1923), which was one of his longest poems based on the values of life and the character from New England (Perkins & Perkins, 2009). A Boy’s Will and North of Boston were two volumes that went unrecognized in America until Frost moved to England where both volumes were accepted and published but when the volumes were later published in the United States this encouraged Frost to return to New Hampshire (Perkins & Perkins, 2009). Frost produced later volumes that are also particularly American and contain discussions of religious insights and contemporary society, New Englanders idealized (Perkins & Perkins, 2009).
Robert Frost is known as a New England poet, and he is also known as an American poet. What makes his poetry so special is the universal appeal of his work (Van Doren, 1951). In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost brings his reader straight to the woods of New England. “Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though;” and “Between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year” (Frost, 1920/2009. p. 1457). In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost again uses his surroundings of the New England area as a major focal point. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…To where it bent in the undergrowth…Because it was grassy and wanted wear; / Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” (Frost, 1915/2009. p. 1451). According to Van Doren, 1951, Frost’s poetry starts at home but then ends up everywhere. Most good poetry tends to do just that. However, Frost’s landscape was not the only aspect of his work that made him American. Some of his poetry had references to what he believed America to be all about.
Robert Frost stands as a great figure in American life and literature. John F. Kennedy once spoke about Frost by saying, “His death impoverishes us all; but he has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding” (Lathem, 1969, p. 609).
In the poem “The Black Cottage,” Frost writes about a deserted home.The speaker in the poem says that the wife always believed “Whatever else the Civil War was for / It wasn’t just to keep the states together / Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both” (Frost, 1915/2012). Frost again uses imagery, such as cherry trees and the cottage itself to depict an American scene, but he is mainly focused on the lives that have come and gone in this home, and the war that took place. The speaker earlier says while pointing to a photo “That was the father as he went to war…He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg” and speaking of the mother he says “Her giving somehow touched the principle / That all men are created equal” (Frost, 1915/2012).
In Robert Frost’s piece, the “Mending Wall” the content and form is about the need of a wall between friends. The content of “Mending Wall” is the surprise of the need of the wall. “No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending-time we find them there” (Frost, 1914/2009, p. 1445). The form of the “Mending Wall” is expressed as Frost writes that over time of not seeing one another, things are forgotten, but as soon as the two meet, the walls go up again for one reason or another. “I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; / And on a day we meet to walk the line/ And set the wall between us once again” (Frost, 1914/2009, p. 1445). Another important content of the “Mending Wall” is how Frost expresses the idea that something’s between the neighbors do not bother them but others will and do so, the “fence” between them is needed. “There where it is we do not need the wall: / He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. / He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’” (Frost, 1914/2009, p. 1445).