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Showing posts from April 3, 2016

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost (1874-1963) The poem Mending Wall was written and published by Robert Frost in 1914 in an influential collection of poems titled North of Boston . Throughout much of his career, a time when many Americans felt alienated by increasingly innovative poetry, Frost was an unusually popular poet. This is due in part to the fact that, while other writers tended to abandon the qualities of poetry of the previous century, Frost's work maintained many of poetry's more traditional conventions. Frost famously insisted, for example, that poetry should be written with formal meter, while many contemporary writers had already abandoned this convention. This doesn't mean, however, that Frost's poetry was straightforward or traditional in content or perspective, as Mending Wall illustrates. The poem is loosely written in  blank verse , meaning unrhymed lines consisting of five iambs in each line. Iambs  are metrical feet that have two syllables, one unstressed