Abstract
This essay argues that Robert Frost s poems enact a poetic and psychic process of displac ing and managing generalized anxiety through converting it into object-specific fear. Drawing upon psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra and Eric Santner, this essay analyzes how and why Robert Frost s poems display a defensive eye: a self-protective relationship to world dependent upon a continual switching of visual and linguistic perspectives that diffuses pressures interior to poem and cre ates a momentary stay against confusion. Through close readings of The Vantage Point, The Mending Wall, The Wood-Pile, The Fear,n An Old Mans Winter Night and A Considerable Speck, the essay traces Frosts visual preoccupation with boundaries, walls, doors, and frames that demarcate spatial limits, and describes how poem negotiates psychological and linguistic tension between containment and catharsis.
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