Wednesday's Poetry Watch #2

This is a new feature I’ll be posting once a week, and in each post I’ll feature a different poet or poem that I really love. I’ll share a few facts about the poet and recommend an additional poem(s) that you may enjoy as well. Poetry has always been a HUGE passion of mine whether it’s writing it, reading it, or discussing it. And I’m really looking excited to share some of the mad love I have for it with all of you lovelies! 

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So for this weeks poetry watch, I decided to feature a poet that I've loved since childhood, Robert Frost. I fell in love with his writing after I got a book featuring one of his poems (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) as a Christmas gift and ever since then I've been a huge fan. 

A few facts for you: "Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26th, 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8th, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent. 
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Frost was 86 when he read his well-known poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20th, 1961. He died in Boston two years later, on January 29th, 1963, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes the last line from his poem, "The Lesson for Today (1942): "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

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One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost is The Road Not Taken. It's a pretty popular poem so I'm sure most of you have read it or at least heard of it. But for those who haven't, take a moment and see the brilliance of this piece.

"The Road Not Taken"

"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;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

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This poem is pretty self explanatory, so there's not really much need in trying to state what it means lol. His is another grave site I'd like to visit someday :) A few other poems I recommend reading are, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Good Hours, and The Sound of Trees. There are so many others I could recommend! But that would take all day lol. 

So do I have any Frost fans out there? Have you read any of his work?

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”