This life-size depiction of Frost is executed in bronze. Frost is seated on a stone bench writing prose on his portable table. He is wearing a button-down shirt and trousers held up with suspenders. He wears laced walking-boots from the 1900s. He is gazing thoughtfully into the distance as he composes.
"The Ekstrand Sculpture Plaza, located at the south entrance to Old Main in the heart of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Norlin Quadrangle, was dedicated September 5, 1997 in memory of Bruce R. Ekstrand, former vice chancellor for academic affairs and member of the CU-Boulder faculty for 30 years. Ekstrand was a member of the faculty at UC Boulder from 1966 until his death in April 1996, at the age of 55, of respiratory failure caused by a cerebral aneurysm. The seated bronze sculpture, designed by George Lundeen, mounted on a curved sandstone bench, depict's Ekstrand's favorite poet, Robert Frost, in the midst of writing a poem." (from (
visit link) )
"Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O’Connor point out in Poems for Study, “Frost’s poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century.” Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.
Frost’s theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-century Romantics, he maintained that a poem is “never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.” Yet, “working out his own version of the ‘impersonal’ view of art,” as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T. S. Eliot‘s idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry: “The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse.... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”
To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up 19th-century tools and made them new. Lawrance Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, “the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content” work to a poet’s advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalist’s burden—the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in “The Constant Symbol,” wrote his verse regular; he never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that “the freshness of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse in turn might be set to music.” He believed, rather, that the poem’s particular mood dictated or determined the poet’s “first commitment to metre and length of line.”
Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his “endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation.” But what Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the “sentence sounds that underlie the words,” the “vocal gesture” that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet’s ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. “The Death of the Hired Man,” for instance, consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound “The Death of the Hired Man” represented Frost at his best—when he “dared to write ... in the natural speech of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the ‘natural’ speech of the newspapers, and of many professors.” " (excerpted from (
visit link) )
"Lundeen's Robert Frost (1874–1963), Class of 1896 presents the poet in his element: both at his alma mater and within nature. The sculpture and its location invite meditation and introspection, both noted hallmarks of Frost's poetry. The sculptor has depicted Frost at mid-life—vigorous, but with the familiar lines of age beginning to form in the poet's face. Frost was interested in farms—during his life, he lived and worked on several—and Lundeen dresses the figure in a heavy work shirt, braces, and high-topped shoes. With regard to the setting, the artist stated, "I wanted to show Frost outdoors, in the environment he knew so well." The artist has created a symbolic and contemplative moment by seating Frost on a large, rough block of New Hampshire granite. "What I've tried to do," Lundeen concluded, "is to capture the everyday, rural New England aspects of Frost's early life, yet suggest something of the creative genius that lay within this most unusual of men." " (from (
visit link) )
Some of Frost's poems may be found at (
visit link)
"Bruce Ekstrand Memorial to be Dedicated Friday
The media are invited to attend the dedication of a sculpture plaza at the University of Colorado at Boulder Friday, Sept. 5, in memory of the late Bruce Ekstrand, former vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The dedication will begin at 4 p.m. and last about 45 minutes. The event is not open to the general public, but about 200 friends and relatives were invited to attend.
Ekstrand died in April 1996, at the age of 55, of respiratory failure caused by a cerebral aneurysm. He had been a member of the CU-Boulder faculty for 30 years and had been vice chancellor for academic affairs from July 1986 until his death.
The plaza, with its bronze sculpture of Ekstrand's favorite poet, Robert Frost, is located at the south entrance to Old Main in the heart of Norlin Quadrangle.
The sculpture, which is mounted on a curved sandstone bench, will be unveiled at the ceremony. It depicts Frost in the midst of writing a poem.
The piece was created by Loveland artist George Lundeen, whose bronze sculpture of a girl on a swing is a focal point on the Downtown Boulder Mall.
'When I saw it, my first instinct was to sit down next to him,' said Pat Magette, a retired CU staff member who worked for Ekstrand in the Office of Academic Affairs for nine years.
The sculpture and plaza were made possible through private donations.
CU Regents Bob Sievers and Jim Martin, President John Buechner, Chancellor Richard Byyny and law Professor Gene Nichol will be among the friends and family members making brief remarks." (from (
visit link) )