Robert Frost and the American Landscape

Abstract

Toward the end of the millennium, our attachment to the land returns, if not exactly according to earlier modes. In literary and philosophic circles, nature writing undergoes a renaissance while explorations of environmental ethics and aesthetics confront both the virus of development and the possibility that nature calendars, featuring say a gorgeous red barn, are examples of eco porn. In the broader population, ecotourism brings intense visitation to national parks, which in turn stirs debates about how to keep nature lovers from loving fragile sites to death. As iconic as the landscape itself, Robert Frost looks bemused in the late photographs, his hair white, his face lined, posed in baggy clothes before a pasture or barn. The poet in his inevitable setting evokes ruggedness, authen ticity, and a trace of our origins. However, in a century dominated by avant garde experimentation, we have also become suspicious of the rural, and Frost has suffered from identification with old fashioned pastoral conventions. Landscape, Nature, and Pastoral have become signifiers with little left to signify, quaint references to past ideals in a world strung on the virtual spaces of the internet. Consequently, we may rethink our image of Frost as a farmer poet and poet farmer, for which reason I wish to look again at notions attached to the poet and to his privileged neighborhood, the dilapidated farm, before return ing to passages from North of Boston, the 1914 volume that tied him so closely to rural New England. Paradoxical antitheses exist in past and present re sponses to Frost, a poet simple in his presentation and unfathomable in his indirections. These antitheses not only direct our reading of Frost but delimit our understanding of landscape and of the rural.