Background of the author
Class Discussion Questions:
1. How would you describe the tone of voice of the speakers in the poems you read for today? Identify the tone or attitude of the speaker in "Birches" and "Mending Wall" and then compare them to "Out, Out—" and "Fire and Ice."
2. In "Mending Wall," look for where the language visually represents the theme of the poem. Can you find it in the shape of the lines? Once you've found it, consider why Frost would use this technique.
3. In "Birches," the speaker gets off track and comes back to his point: "But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter of fact about the ice storm . . ." How would you characterize this kind of honesty? How is it different from Whitman's type of honesty?
4. Frost is an ACCESSIBLE poet in a way that other poets we read are not. What is the ethical value of his accessibility to you? What is accessibility?
5. What does Robert Frost mean when he says that a poem can be “a momentary stay against confusion”? What IS the figure a poem makes? And what is Frost's concern in explaining this figure?
