Frost's Poetry Research Articles

Love's Sentence: Domesticity as Religious Discourse in Robert Frost's Poetry

Love's Sentence: Domesticity as Religious Discourse in Robert Frost's Poetry

Frost and Modernism

P until fairly recently, the conventional wisdom about the relation of Robert Frost to modernism, when it was considered at all, was that for the most part there was none-that between Frost's poetry on the one hand and a virtually monolithic phenomenon composed primarily of the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams on the other, there was and could be little commerce. But over the last several years, as the issue has begun to be addressed with greater seriousness and scrutiny (by such critics as Frank Lentricchia, Richard Poirier, William Pritchard, and others), it has become harder not only to maintain the separation between Frost and his contemporaries but to continue to regard modernism itself as a unified, homogeneous movement in literary history, as though it were an exclusive club with strict rules of membership and with no room for a poet who refused to abandon the formal and generic conventions of traditional verse. The insistence on Frost's difference from modernism, it has become clear, was based on an oversimplification of both. Whether Frost himself would have welcomed the end of his exclusion from the company of the great modern poets is, of course, another question. His friendship with Pound, Frost once noted, lasted but six weeks, his relations with Stevens were always cool and distant, and Eliot and Williams he hardly knew at all and seemed to prefer it that way. But in spite of Frost's personal attitudes and antipathies, which probably contributed to the general critical sense of his isolation from his contemporaries, one important result of this new attention to him in the context of modernism may well be a new understanding of modernism itself, of the different ways in which it was possible to be a modern poet. And such understanding may derive as

Robert Frost's "The Census-Taker" and the Problem of Wilderness

In many of Robert Frost's best poems the spirit of place that is New England is a diminishing thing, represented by a landscape in which the capacity for human renewal has apparently faded, leaving mad farm wives, eccentric telescopists, and most poignantly the ruins of hill farms abandoned their owners die off or simply gave up trying to coax the recalcitrant and exhausted land into profit. Census-Taker is characteristic, but it is archaeologically specific, and in the elegiac dignity of its blank verse it partially redeems a spiritually and humanly impoverished semi-wilderness landscape through the historical sensitivity of the speaker and his morally attractive desire for life to go on living. It is also, Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, as explicit a with nothingness anything in modern American poetry.' The relative wilderness of much of New England's hill country, its abandoned farmland and logging tracts, the mutability of landscape and its shifting relationship to the idea of home, and the fact of wilderness a potentially heavy-handed and dehumanizing metaphor of the darker side of the human character occupy Frost from his earliest poems to the end of his career. No summary can convey the complexity of his exploration of these problems, nor the dignity-almost Miltonic, at times-of his elegant verse and the ingenuity with which it embodies and fulfills the poet's ambitious and skeptical vision. But even a brief glance at some of Frost's other important wilderness poems points to the ambiguities of that vision and suggests why any reading of Census-Taker is tentative at best. The confrontation with nothingness, which usually in Frost's poetry stirs at

"The Place is the Asylum": Women and Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry

Frost's A Servant Servants the speaker describes her mad uncle. He was kept at home with his family, but within the was another house made of hickory-wood bars, cage keep him safe, and keep others safe. He tore shreds any furniture put inside make him comfortable; he removed all his clothes and carried them on his arm. He lived, animal-like, in bed of straw. The man went mad quite young, and the speaker believes it likely that he was crossed in love. . . . Anyway all he talked about was love.' The other prominent figure in the speaker's memory is the bride, her mother, brought into the madhouse where had lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night. She witnesses the madness, and she is in her role as bride an embodiment of the cause of his madness. The speaker has left this with her husband,2 moving from the isolated cabin ten miles from anywhere place with lake stretching out beyond her kitchen window like sheet of glass. Her vistas opened, she feels still prisoner and has escaped outside talk with the migrant workers camped on her husband's land. She is torn by conflicting desires, to live out on ground and yet keep a good roof overhead. She knows the power of place, for she has been sent, once, the State Asylum, where walls are impregnable and the roof is more than sound. Now trapped in filled by her husband's hired men, who come

Frost's Poetry of Fear

DOTH AS PRIVATE EXPERIENCE and as an intruder on marriage, JL)fear is a recurring theme in the poetry of Robert Frost. Since it is alien to love, it can threaten marriage through an outside person like the Stranger in Love and a Question, but his identity varies from poem to poem. Fear is also a private, singly-experienced thing, as in Old Man's Winter Night, a poem that sees fear as related to nature. Nature itself is not fear, nor does it know fear (unless, as with the Old Man, it is shocked at him), but fear can grow out of man's relationship with it. variant is the awe/fear response of human beings in the presence of nature as divinity (Going for Water), or it may be the threat of nature to reclaim human institutions-in various Frost poems nature fills in vacated cellar holes and abandoned roads. But in these matters human neglect is at fault, and the resulting fear is an unrealized expression of that fault. A Brook in the City is about urban neuroses, but we shall consider fear that relates to Frost's country things. This may be as it is experienced by persons together, or alone. An example of the former, Going for Water, tells the love-shared experience of nature as deity. On a cool autumn evening, a couple whose well has gone dry seek a brook in their woods. They run to meet the moonlight coming up out of the trees, but then pause within the shadow: And in the hush we joined to make/We heard, we knew we heard the brook.' poem depicts a shared awe in the presence of the stream nymph. couple were playing with the moon until they entered the darkness, which makes them listen for the brook before they look for it. They do so reverently, the mood in which one should meet nature. Failing in the proper encounter unbalances the awe and turns it into fear. Something close to such fear is experienced alone in The

Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry

T HE VOLUME OF ROBERT FROST'S POETRY entitled Complete Poems (1949) covers his varied production from before the turn of this century up through his poetic drama, The Masque of Mercy (I947). Even a casual reading shows that Frost's poetry is not homogeneous in form and subject matter. The self-conscious lyrics of A Boy's Will (1913) give way to the dialogues of country folk in North of Boston (I914) and the urbane and witty poems of the following years. Critics have shown alarm in dealing with the poetry of Frost as a whole, for many fail to recognize any line of continuity in this varied collection. Thus Frost has been accused of lacking a consistent point of view and of rejecting out of hand all firm systems of human value. George W. Nitchie compares him unfavorably on this point with his contemporaries Yeats and Eliot.

The Hidden Terror of Robert Frost

that even the nonliterary minded students of Up the Down Staircase find little difficulty in fathoming the choices posed by The Road Not Taken. It is precisely this apparent simplicity, however, which makes students unwilling to see the deeper merits and meanings of much of Frost's poetry. They are too much in love with their comprehension of him; here, at last, is a modern poet they can understand. They are also too fond of regarding him as a salty old curmudgeon, as a tart but kindly old man with a white leonine mane and an

An Approach to Robert Frost's Nature Poetry

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

Religion in Robert Frost's Poetry: The Play for Self-Possession

]f) ELIGIOUS IS ONE OF THE LAST ADJECTIVES one would ordinarily JiMuse to describe Robert Frost's poetry. The individual self, which is its central reality, feels completely cut off from any divine reality beyond its own spiritual elements of love, courage, and creativity. Yet the speaker in the poetry keeps alive the possibility that something greater than man sustains order and purpose in the universe and may sometime break through man's isolation to reveal itself. It may even alleviate his inner uncertainty and fear about his final destiny. The terms in which the question is raised are strongly influenced by Judaeo-Christian assumptions. Yet any self-transcending leap of faith toward such a possibility seems too great a risk when even to stand firm in self-possession requires heroic efforts against the onslaughts of time, nature, and the dehumanizing chaos of modern society. Easy religious assurances, like other palliatives for man's deepest fears and woes, are a dangerous temptation to disarm himself of his own resources of patience and courage. Frost's response to all threats to human identity is Give us immedicable woes. ...And then to play. The play's the thing. Play's the thing. All virtue in 'as if.'1 Frost's play with religious matters is a deliberate enactment of doubtful searching, hopes, and fears in poetic forms that control and distance them, often with humor. Mastery over this form is a kind of mastery over impulses either to reject religion absolutely or to commit oneself to it. Thus the poet can explore by manipulating an ambiguous theme, create forms for selfprotection and selfasserdon, and finally make his own kind of salvation.

Robert Frost and the Comic Spirit

TN A CELEBRATED SPEECH Lionel Trilling made the following proJL nouncement: I think of Robert Frost as a poet. Call him, if it makes things any easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful every now and then to come out from under the shelter of that literary word. universe that he conceives is a universe.'l Probably Mr. Trilling was not trying to confine the multiplicity of Frost's poetry within a single adjective, though for such a purpose terrifying would be a shrewd choice. Impressively, though not preponderantly, the effect of this quality is indeed the emergence of a tragic view of life. But much of Frost's poetry is brilliantly comic, and, as is classically the case, his comedy is an inverted expression of the insight which makes him likewise a tragic (or terrifying) poet. This correspondence Frost himself neatly formulates in The Lesson for Today, as he banters to pedagogue with the fancied Master of the Palace School: