Abstract
In many of his poems, Robert Frost deploys space, rather than time or the narrative episode, to anchor the tragic, which we define as the lack of the habitable attributes of the dwelling space. Frost brings the domestic tragic into a high degree of prominence, sketching for his readers a spatial reality that is situated within the parameters of the dwelling space. To him, this interaction with space defines a permanent struggle on the part of human beings to create a habitable environment, one that embodies the true essence of dwelling. Following from a critical conversation on spatiality and dwelling, we appropriate Gaston Bachelard’s and Martin Heidegger's phenomenological notions of homeness and non-homeness to interpret Frost's nuanced spatial dramatizations and his poetics of dwelling. Informed by the critical insights of these two thinkers, we argue that Frost's spatial dramatizations describe a polarized, irrational environment where the notion of homeness is built upon non-homeness and where the dweller is unable to understand his/her relationship with the dwelling space. We thus bring attention to Frost as a modernist poet significantly contributing to the critical conversation and phenomenological tradition on modern spaces and the modern experience of homeness/non-homeness. Keywords: Twentieth-Century Poetry; Robert Frost; Space; Bachelard; Heidegger; Dwelling
Highlights
In Robert Frost’s poetry, the tragic is spatially anchored
Frost brings the domestic tragic into a high degree of prominence, sketching for his readers a spatial reality that is situated within the parameters of the dwelling space
Bachelard (1964) stresses an important point concerning the house as a poetic image: He talks about man’s attachment to his dwelling space in terms of spatiality rather than temporality, arguing that we think that “we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability” (p. 8)
Summary
In Robert Frost’s poetry, the tragic is spatially anchored. This means that the development of action is not typically temporal or episodic but rather spatial. Putting the American poet in conversation with this phenomenological tradition helps us to gain insight into the complex nature of the modern experience of non-homeness in general and of the poet's unique translation of the intricacies of such experience and phenomenological notions into dramatic poems describing American domestic spaces in decline Critics such as Frank Lentricchia (1975), and more recently, David Spurr (2012) consider Frost in light of this European phenomenology of dwelling. Following from this critical trend, we appropriate the notion of non-homeness/homeness in Bachelard and Heidegger to discuss the domestic tragic in Frost's dwelling spaces. We are contributing to this recent blooming conversation on the notion of spatiality in literature and especially in modern poetry through phenomenological, rather than political or geocritical or geopolitical, lens, especially that critics continue to ignore Frost's spatial dramatizations of the domestic tragic and his phenomenology of dwelling
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