Chungang Xu
Robert Frost (1874- 1963) is the most outstanding American poet in the 20th century. His works are famous for their simplicity and profundity, which have been evaluated by Pound, Eliot, Borges and brodsky. His life is both unfortunate and full of glory: there were ups and downs before he was 40 years old, and he was lonely in the second half of his life. He won four Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 44 honorary degrees and various honors. He is often called the double-faced god of American poetry. His works and personality have been attacked, but he has always maintained the kind image of a great poet. He is also a trinity of poet, farmer and philosopher. Frost has been writing poems through concrete objects and scenes. Stevens said that you love writing objects, and Frost retorted that you also love writing antiques. This is actually the spiritual schema and writing form of the poet's pre-selection, which has hardly changed much in his life. As a great poet who pays attention to reality in a natural way, his attitude towards the world is not as gentle as Wordsworth's, nor as strong as Stevens', but rather contradictory and eclectic, with transcendentalism as his spiritual mentor. He learned from Virgil to write pastoral poems, and from Hardy, Ye Zhi and others to learn simple and suggestive language, but his intention was deeper. His works often form a solid, closed but extremely open poetic text through the contrast between time and space, that is, the change and contrast in specific situations, which concisely expresses the truth of existence and turns decay into magic. He likes to write with a mask and advocates the game principle of literature. From the beginning, he wrote simply and implicitly. The boy's will, the first book of poetry (19 13), shows his extraordinary language talent. Although Frost has been writing with a mask, I prefer to call him a "great tramp". He wandered between nature and human beings, ego and things, reality and ideal, and looked at earthly life calmly and distressfully like an angel exiled by God. Frost lost his father in childhood, his wife in middle age and his children in old age. The rough life often makes him feel gloomy and pessimistic in his works, but he wants to use poetry, a lofty art form, to dispel his anxiety and confusion. He is wise but not extreme. He once compared the world to his lover in a poem, so the incessant noise became his swaying feelings and lifelong philosophical pursuit. He knows exactly what is unique. His contribution to modern poetry mainly lies in resolutely rejecting the trend of free verse and exploring a new blank verse that combines traditional iambic rhyme with daily life discourse, classical humanistic feelings, modern skepticism and personal taste. Seemingly conservative, but actually brilliant. Since Baudelaire, almost no master of poetry can be compared with Dante in the high level of spirit and the depth and breadth of subject matter, but Frost's exploration should be said to be the most natural and far-reaching, so it is welcomed by readers at all levels in the world and is a household name in the United States. Frost's unpretentious lyric short poems and dramatic and artistic narrative long poems can stand any test. All kinds of works, such as blank poems, variant sonnets, double lines and so on, are excellent works, and Wordsworth is also a master of genre. He began to write poetry at the age of 16 until he died at the age of 89, and kept writing for more than half a century. * * * published 10 Yu Ben's poems, mainly north of Boston (19 14) and mountains (19 16). The Witness Tree (1942) and Glide (1962) have a unique position in the history of American literature, and they are also brilliant stars in the history of world literature. However, as Yu Guangzhong said, Frost suffered a "great loss" in China, because the essence of everyday language poetry was lost after translation. On the surface, dozens of poems selected and translated here are the essence of Frost's creation in various periods, but it is also very likely that they are still misinformed. However, through them, we can roughly feel the spiritual world of a talented poet, a personal understanding of human and earthly life. It should be said that they still have very important reference significance for the writing of contemporary poets in China.