Desert Places
   HOME
*





Desert Places
"Desert Places" is a poem by Robert Frost. It was originally written in 1933 and appeared in ''The American Mercury'' in April 1934, before being collected in Frost's 1936 book '' A Further Range''. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Background Frost composed the poem in the winter of 1933 during bouts of illness and depression. It is one of the poems Frost claims to have written "without fumbling a sentence." Analysis Themes and tone The poem is considered one of Frost's darker and more somber poems, focusing on the terrifying nature of existence. Additional themes are ones of loneliness, fear, and despair. The poem opens with the speaker passing by an empty field during a snowstorm around dusk. As the field is covered with snow, the speaker contemplates the blankness and the whiteness of the snow, a snow "with no expression, nothing to express." The speaker then turns his contemplation to the night sky "with their empty spaces / Between stars." The poem shar ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March26, 1874January29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution".''Contemporary Literary Criticism''. Ed. Jean C. Stine, Bridget Broderick, and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. p 110. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont. Biography Early life Robert Frost was born in San Francisco to journalist William Prescott Frost J ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

The American Mercury
''The American Mercury'' was an American magazine published from 1924Staff (Dec. 31, 1923)"Bichloride of Mercury."''Time''. to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers, including William F. Buckley. A second change in ownership in the 1950s turned the magazine into a far-right and virulently anti-Semitic publication. It was published monthly in New York City. The magazine went out of business in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy. History H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had previously edited ''The Smart Set'' literary magazine, when not producing their own books and, in Mencken's case, regular journalism for ''The Baltimore Sun''. With their mutual book publisher Alfred A ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


A Further Range
''A Further Range'' is a collection of poems by Robert Frost published in 1936 by Henry Holt and Company (New York) and in 1937 by Jonathan Cape (London). Reception The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1937. Journalism awards Letters and Drama Awards * Novel: ** ''Gone with the Wind'' by Margaret Mitchell ( Macmillan). *Drama: ** '' You Can't Take It with You'' by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman ( F ... for poetry. Contents This volume is divided into 6 parts: 1-Taken Doubly; 2-Taken Singly; 3-Ten Mills; 4-The Outlands; 5-Build Soil; 6-A Missive Missile. The dedication: "To E. F. for what it may mean to her that beyond the White Mountains were the Green; beyond both were the Rockies, the Sierras, and, in thought, the Andes and the Himalayas—range beyond range even into the realm of government and religion." The poems had previously been published in ''The Saturday Review of Literature'', ''The Yale Review'', ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

1937 Pulitzer Prize
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1937. Journalism awards Letters and Drama Awards *Novel: ** ''Gone with the Wind'' by Margaret Mitchell (Macmillan). *Drama: ** '' You Can't Take It with You'' by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman ( Farrar). *History: **''The Flowering of New England 1815–1865'' by Van Wyck Brooks (E. P. Dutton). * Biography or Autobiography: **''Hamilton Fish'' by Allan Nevins (Dodd). *Poetry: ** ''A Further Range'' by Robert Frost (Holt) References External linksPulitzer Prizes for 1937 {{Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prizes by year Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem by Robert Frost, written in 1922, and published in 1923 in his ''New Hampshire'' volume. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it "my best bid for remembrance". Analysis The text of the poem reflects the thoughts of a lone wagon driver (the narrator), pausing at dusk in his travel to watch snow falling in the woods. It ends with him reminding himself that, despite the loveliness of the view, "I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep." Background Frost wrote the poem in June 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" from the poetry collection of the same name, and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". He wrote the new poem "about the snowy evening an ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’
''Irish Times,'' 30 August 2013.
Seamus Heaney obituary
''The Guardian,'' 30 August 2013.
Among his best-known works is '''' (1966), his first major published volume. H ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks ( ; October 16, 1906 – May 10, 1994) was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, '' The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry'' (1947) and ''Modern Poetry and the Tradition'' (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" (Leitch 2001) and codifying the principles of close reading. Brooks was also the preeminent critic of Southern literature, writing classic texts on William Faulkner, and co-founder of the influential journal ''The Southern Review'' (Leitch 2001) with Robert Penn Warren. Biographical information The early years On October 16, 1906, in Murray, Kentucky, Brooks was born to a Methodist minister, the R ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal ''The Southern Review'' with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for ''All the King's Men'' (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Early years Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia, and she was a descendant of Revolutionary War soldier Colonel Abram Penn. Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta K ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Understanding Poetry
''Understanding Poetry'' was an American college textbook and poetry anthology by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, first published in 1938. The book influenced New Criticism and went through its fourth edition in 1976. The textbook "widely influenced ... the study of poetry at the college level in America." The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has named the book one of the "Fifty best books of the century." ''Understanding Poetry'', according to an article at the ''Modern American Poetry'' Web site, "codified many of the so-called New Critical ideas into a coherent approach to literary study. Their book, and its companion volume, ''Understanding Fiction'' (1943), revolutionized the teaching of literature in the universities and spawned a host of imitators who dominated English departments well into the 1960s." Even those who are highly critical of the textbook's approach to poetry have acknowledged the reach and influence of the volume. Poet Ron Silliman has called it "t ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel '' Fanshawe''; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as ''Twice-Told Tales''. The following year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. ''The Scarlet Letter'' was published in 1850, followed by a suc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 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's ''magnum opus'' is generally considered to be ''The Prelude'', a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850. Early life The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, (now in Cumbria), part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he wa ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

1934 Poems
Events January–February * January 1 – The International Telecommunication Union, a specialist agency of the League of Nations, is established. * January 15 – The 8.0 1934 Nepal–Bihar earthquake, Nepal–Bihar earthquake strikes Nepal and Bihar with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''), killing an estimated 6,000–10,700 people. * January 26 – A 10-year German–Polish declaration of non-aggression is signed by Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic. * January 30 ** In Nazi Germany, the political power of federal states such as Prussia is substantially abolished, by the "Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich" (''Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reiches''). ** Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, signs the Gold Reserve Act: all gold held in the Federal Reserve is to be surrendered to the United States Department of the Treasury; immediately following, the President raises the statutory gold price from ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]