The Brain of Robert Frost

Abstract

TH HIS TITLE may suggest that I have deliberately chosen a small subject, prompted to mercy perhaps by the weighty burden of some of these cogitations on creation and interpretation. Mercy, however, was not my motive. I have three points in mind. First, I want to show how Robert Frost's interpretations share quite exactly the general style of his writing. In other words, I think one salient fact about the relation between creation and interpretation is that they embody the same personal style. Second, based on that commonality of style, I want to propose a picture or metaphor or guiding principle that will enable us to put together Robert Frost, unique creator, with Robert Frost, a reader of poems like any other reader of poems. I want to suggest that one could refine that general picture to a model, even an electronic model. We could use such a model-and this is my third point-to understand the relation between the individuality that pervades both creation and interpretation and the social and codes by which we collectively interpret. We could use the model to interrelate Robert Frost the individual with, say, the codes addressed by a semiotician like Umberto Eco, or the interpretive communities of which Stanley Fish writes, or the horizon of expectations described by a Rezeptionsdsthetiker like Hans Robert Jauss.