Discuss the significant features of Robert Frost’s poetry? Answer with special reference to ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘Birches’.

Robert Frost was born in California where his father, a journalist with political aspirations and a dissatisfied northeastemer, had moved. He was an occasionally violent man and developed in Frost a lifelong wariness towards destructive impulses. His mother was Scottish and wrote poetry. Through her Frost became acquainted with the Romantic poets as well as New England poets like Emerson. She also introduced him to organised Christian religion.

Frost’s father died in 1885, the family returned to New England, and Frost finished high school from Lawrence, Massachusetts, (studying classics) as the class valedictorian. Three years later he manied his classmate and fellow valedictorian, Eleanor White. Frost studied for a short time at Dartmouth College, taught in schools, and then enrolled as aspecial student at Harvard (1 ~97~~1899) where he was influenced by William James and George Santayana. He took courses in English, philosophy and the classics. From Harvard he entered a completely different world. His grandfather had left him a farm in New Hampshire and Frost, his wife and his four children endured years’ of hardship there. While he was struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide Frost was also composing poetry and establishing a close link with nature. In the years 1906-7 he wrote many