An Approach to Robert Frost's Nature Poetry

Abstract

qualities, will probably think first of the speaker's unmistakable voice, next of the recurrent rural setting. Most discussions of the lyrics have centered on these aspects. But the speaker has been too quickly assimilated into the tradition of the cracker barrel philosopher, merely because he is colloquial and nonallusive. The setting, simply because it is rural, has often been too facilely assumed to prove that Frost is an antimodern. Instead of examining the poetic landscape in detail, critics have talked about the real New England and Frost's retreat to it. They have labeled Frost a and then assumed that he was a version of Emerson or Wordsworth-as though there were only one way to be a nature poet. In the 1930s, when critical approaches to Frost were developing, this nature poet was rejected by the social critics for being hopelessly oldfashioned, scolded by the humanists for an evasive pantheism and ignored by the new critics because his poems lacked (or seemingly lacked) ironic cross-currents, dissolving potential tension in easy humor. Frost's defenders have too often accepted the premises of the attacks-that all nature poetry is of a kind, that a colloquial voice cannot carry tension-and thereby served mainly to perpetuate the picture of Frost as a sort of inspired plowman.' In the last decade, close-reading techniques have been applied to Frost's poetry with exciting and valuable results, but few interpreters have escaped entirely the pervasive conviction that to use nature is to use it