Tag Archives: Robert Frost

The Road Less Traveled? Nope

By Robin Bates | Published: July 31, 2012

Perhaps some entrepreneurs need to believe their success is solely due to their own efforts, as Bounderby, Willy Loman, and the speaker of “The Road Not Taken” do.

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Growing More Liberal as We Age

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2012

Frost may allude to the belief that we become more conservative as we age, but his own poetry refutes the claim.

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Meaning Is the Meaning of the Liberal Arts

By Robin Bates | Published: April 11, 2011

When Frost’s tree falls in front of us, it can mean two things (at least). Literally, it’s a hassle. To the unexamined life, that’s all it will ever be. Get down and clear it away. On the other hand, there’s that question of meaning and where it comes from. Human beings do their best when their actions are invested with significance. That’s why we have ceremonies, like this one, to compel us to stop (because time itself doesn’t do so on its own), take some time, reflect on the significance of what is happening to us.

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What to Make of a Diminished Peyton

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2010

Sports Saturday “The question that he frames in all but words,” Robert Frost writes in his “Ovenbird” sonnet, “is what to make of a diminished thing.” This poem has always had a special place in my heart.The ovenbird is not a bird that sings when June is bustin’ out all over.Rather, it is a “mid-summer and […]

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Essay Grading and the Great Wall of China

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2010

At this time of year, I sometimes wonder why I signed up for this gig. Stacks of ungraded essays are strewn “far and wee” across my study, and only the knowledge that I have completed my student essays in the past assures me that I will make it through this batch. In my hour of […]

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Soccer, an Un-American Sport?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2010

Landon Donovan, man of the match        Sports Saturday Years ago I read (I think in The Washington Post) a humorous article about why Americans are not great soccer enthusiasts.  The article said that Americans have problems with a game where a two-goal lead is practically insurmountable. Robert Frost would have something to say about that. […]

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Mending Walls Can Save Lives

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2010

Robert Frost’s poems (as indicated by “Mending Wall,” which I wrote on yesterday) have the wonderful ability to move from the very specific to the universal.  One begins with a small incident (two neighbors fixing a stone wall) and, before one knows it, one is thinking deeply about the world–barriers between people, roads not taken, […]

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Fences, Good Neighbors, and Immigration

By Robin Bates | Published: June 1, 2010

Will America’s most famous poem about fences give us any insight into the border problems we are currently experiencing with Mexico? Let’s take a look at it and find out. The poem I have in mind is, of course, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Here it is:

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Earth, Love, Birches, and Ice Storms

By Robin Bates | Published: February 11, 2010

I promised this post on Robert Frost’s “Birches” in the event that we have an ice storm.  I don’t know yet whether we will have one, but we had frozen rain for much of the night, and as I write this (Wednesday morning) we are being attacked by a blizzard.  So if I don’t arrange […]

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