M.A sem 2 Department of English M K Bhavnagar University . paper No- 108 Amarican Literature.

1. Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Sem 2 | Batch 2023-25
Date: 8 April 2024
Comparative Study of Robert
Frost and William Wordsworth
Asha Rathod

2. Comparative Study of
Robert Frost and
William Wordsworth
Prepared by Asha rathod

3. Personal Information
Name Asha Rathod
Roll No 03
Email id asharathod1451@gmail.com
M.A Sem 2 (2023-25)
Paper No 108
Paper Name The American Literature
Submitted to smt. S. B. Gardi Department of
English, Bhavnagar

4. Table of contents
Introduction of Writers
01
Differences
02
Comparison Between Frost and
Wordsworth
03
04
Comparison between poems
05
References
Nature in Both Authors
06

5. William Wordsworth Robert Frost
American Poet
English Poet

6. William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet
who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Wordsworth lost his mother when he was eight years old, and his father when he
was thirteen,in 1783.
Wordsworth would inspire their audience to see the world freshly,
sympathetically and naturally.The following titles are some of the most famous
poems included in the collection "Lyrical Ballads" :
● Lines Written in Early Spring (1798)
● The Nightingale (1798)
● The Brothers. A Pastoral Poem (1799-1800)
● Poor Susan (probably composed between 1797-1800)
● Michael. A Pastoral Poem. (1800)
● Tintern Abbey (1798)
● The Lucy Poems (1799-1800) (Benin)
➢ William Wordsworth

7. ➢ Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an
American poet. His work was initially published in England before it
was published in the United States.
Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He was awarded the
Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named
poet laureate of Vermont.
"The Road Not Taken" - 1916
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" - 1923
"Fire and Ice" - 1920
"Mending Wall" - 1914
""The Death of the Hired Man" - 1914
"Nothing Gold Can Stay" - 1923
"Design" - 1936
"Out, Out—" - 1916
(Husain)
➔ Famous poem by Frost

8. William Wordsworth & Robert Frost
★ Wordsworth is a pantheist.
★ Wordsworth's poetry "begins in delight and
ends in delight."
★ Wordsworth is genuinely simple his poetry
has plain words and thoughts. Wordsworth
is plain both in manner and matter. He is
never pretentious, covert and deceptive.
★ In Wordsworth's poetry, nature is supreme,
where humans and nature forge an intimate
communion.
★ Wordsworth is the poet of thought and
meditation .
★ Wordsworth was a transcendentalist,
romantic and mystic.
★ Frost is an environmentalist
★ Frost's poetry, to use his own words, "begins
in delight and ends in wisdom".
★ Frost is deceptively plain, his poetry contains
plain words but complex thoughts.plainness is
present but it is a deceptive plainness.
★ In Frost, rural people are supreme and nature
has been made subordinate to humans. It is
hard to describe Frost as the poet of nature
★ Frost is always in favour of ceaseless mobility,
of activity and action.
★ Frost is one of activity, work, obligation and
duty. Frost was pragmatic, worldly and
anti-Romantic. (muslim)

9. Both Wordsworth and Frost wrote in the ordinary language of ordinary people.
Both poets consciously avoided the rhetorical extravaganza of William Shakespeare and
grandiloquence of John Milton.
Both Wordsworth and Frost are democratic in style as they speak "to men in the tongue all men
know because they are men.
It is true that both poets sought to find solace and delight in nature. The poem Birches offers the
best example of how the poet blends observation and imagination, fact and fancy, feeling and
wisdom.
Both Wordsworth and Frost are optimistic in their attitude to life. As Jonathan Swift had all
complaints against humankind, Frost had all the complaints against nature. But still he would
seek recourse to nature, when he becomes weary of urban life. In Birches, he says:
"Earth's the right place for love,
I don't know where it's likely to go better." (muslim)
Similarity of Wordsworth and Frost

10. Nature in William Wordsworth and Robert Frost
Wordsworth conceived Nature as a living Personality. He finds out
as well as establishes in his poems a cordial, passionate,
impressive, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and inseparable
relationship between nature and human life.He believed that there
is a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature. He realised
nature’s role as a teacher and educator. (Mahbub)
Frost's use of nature is the single most misunderstood element of his
poetry as he himself said, "I am not a Nature poet. Most of Frost's
poems use nature imagery. His grasp and understanding of natural
fact is well recognized. Frost like Wordsworth is not trying to tell us
how nature works. Robert Frost saw nature as an alien force capable
of destroying man, but he also saw man's struggle with nature as a
heroic battle. Frost uses nature as a background. He usually begins a
poem with an observation of something in nature and then moves
toward a connection to some human situation or concern. Frost is
neither a transcendentalist nor a pantheist. (Husain)

11. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Fire and Ice
Poems
William Wordsworth Robert Frost

12. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Fire and Ice
● The poem four six- line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-
couplet rhyme Scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic
tetrameter.
● This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the
Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and
memory, this time with a particularly spare, musical eloquence.
● The characterization of the sudden occurrence of memory the
daffodils "flash upon the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude"
● The Speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a
cloud-
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high.."
● The daffodils are continually personified as human beings,
dancing and "tossing their heads" in " a crowd, a host"
● This technique implies an inherent unity between man and human
● Message : Nature’s Beauty with a mix of Happiness and
Loneliness.
● Fire and Ice is a popular poem by Robert Frost that
discusses the end of the world, likening the elemental force
of fire with the emotions of desire, and ice and with hate.
● The poem is written in a single nine line stanza, which
greatly narrows in the last two lines. The poem's meter is an
irregular mix of iambic tetrameter and dimeter and rhyme
ABA ABC BCB.
● The Speaker is two different scenarios for the end of the
World and some people think the world will end in
fire.
● The Speaker begins by relating that, when it comes to how
the world end for example in poem, a potential world
ending "Fire" could be something like the asteroid that
most likely destroyed the dinosaurs
● "Ice" Could relate to a future ice age, or a extinguishment of
the sun, and naturalistic ends of the world.
● Message: A metaphor for human perceptions of desires and
hatred.

13. References
Baym, Nina. “An Approach to Robert Frost’s Nature Poetry.” American Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 4, 1965, pp. 713–23. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/2711128. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
Benin, Nikola. “(PDF) WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770 – 1850).” ResearchGate, 19 December 2019,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338033117_WILLIAM_WORDSWORTH_1770_-_1850. Accessed 3 April 2024.
Gerber, Philip L.. "Robert Frost". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Mar. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost. Accessed 3 April
2024.
Husain, Haider. “(PDF) Explore the Natural Beauty of Robert Frost's in his Poetry.” ResearchGate, 14 November 2023,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352368954_Explore_the_Natural_Beauty_of_Robert_Frost's_in_his_Poetry. Accessed 3 April 2024.
Mahbub, Ahmad. “(PDF) Nature in William Wordsworth and Robert Frost - A Comparative Study.” ResearchGate, 3 October 2023,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320596446_Nature_in_William_Wordsworth_and_Robert_Frost_-_A_Comparative
_Study. Accessed 7 April 2024.
muslim, Syed naquib. “Frost and Wordsworth: a comparative overview.” The Daily Star, 9 November 2017, https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-199347. Accessed 3 April 2024.