Robert Frost Research Articles

A Deconstructionist View of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and Robert Frost's “Design”

Deconstructionism, which entails carefully examining a text and underscoring its inconsistencies, ambiguities, and paradoxes, is employed in this paper to evaluate Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost’s poetry. Deconstructionists examine how a text opposes or challenges its own meaning rather than trying to come about a single, conclusive interpretation. They might look at how a text challenges prevailing idea, reveals the limitations of language or undermines the conventional distinctions between gender, race, and class. They could examine how the poem’s themes are distorted or contradicted, as well as how it highlights the limitations of conventional binary oppositions like male/female, self/other, and nature/culture. The poetry of Sylvia Plath is frequently recognized for its great emotional depth and its examination of serious subject matters like loneliness, death, and mental illness. Plath frequently uses intricate metaphors and symbols in her poems, as well as startling and vivid imagery. For instance, “Lady Lazarus” is recognized as one of Plath’s most known pieces and a haunting exploration of the themes of death, rebirth, and identity. On the other hand, Robert Frost is renowned for his bucolic and frequently sentimental images of rural life in New England. His poetry is known for its use of straightforward, simple language and often examines themes like nature, interpersonal relationships, and the passage of time. For instance, the poem “Design” prompts critical reflection on the nature of our existence and our place within such a complex universe.

Robert Frost: Teaching and the Pleasure of Ulteriority

ROBERT FROST was a teacher as well as a poet, and a genius of teacherly aphorisms. ‘A word about recognition’, he warmed up a recent student about how poetry should work: ‘It is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize’.1 This is his canny power. Hospitality to readers welcomes those who may have shied away from poetry as esoterica which professorial hierophants wring into hidden meanings. ‘Every poem of his, he said, was based on an actual experience.’2 ‘Based on’ is the place to begin, then to play with. Frost’s poetry mirrors something we may know, might know, might think along with, play along with. Just as typically, Frost has something in the wings, waiting for a call to the stage, ulterior. ‘Ulteriority’ is not a word in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, and it gains only one entry, from the eighteenth century, in the OED. Frost liked the branding of the adjective into a substantive poetic method: ‘the pleasure of ulteriority’ is ‘saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another’. This is ‘metaphor’, he says, what ‘poetry is made’ of; but the first phrasing is also a fair enough definition of irony.3 Frost’s literary pleasure blends irony and metaphor, casting evident meaning into slant meaning. It takes ‘literary appreciation’ to ‘perceive that an ulterior meaning had been included in the particular meaning’, he lectured in 1953.4

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: Robert Frost’s Comments on Emerson

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: Robert Frost’s Comments on Emerson

Robert Frost: Poems in Books, Poems against Books

In Robert Frost’s oeuvre the poetry book or volume is an important unit or scale for the composition, reception, and interpretation of poetry, but its formal parameters and generic conventions have been understudied. Focusing on the arrangement of poems within Frost’s first five books, and then their eventual derangement in his first Collected Poems, I examine Frost’s conflicting convictions on the question of the independence of each individual poem versus the coherence of several in an integrated collection.

Robert Frost's Birches: An Ecocritical Perspective

Robert Frost's Birches: An Ecocritical Perspective

Loved It: The Boys of Summer

Loved It: The Boys of Summer Karen E. Kubara (bio) Roger Kahn aspired to be a writer. When the crunch came, he promised himself to write one book, his book, about the things and places and people he loved.1 That his subject was baseball is particularly American. Writers had been inspired by organized baseball almost from its beginning. The press box at the Polo Grounds circa 1907– 11 “could easily have been mistaken for an outdoor literary club,” sportswriter Bozeman Bulger once said.2 In The Boys of Summer Kahn is fan, reporter, and literary artist. His book is a classic. I call as my first witness Brett McKay of theartofmanliness.com. After studying the classics in college, McKay will tell you why every man should study classical culture. We know Kahn grew up immersed in the classics, at school and at home, which, to the dismay of some readers, comes through in his writing. McKay, his wife Kate, and their team have compiled a list: 100 Books Every Man Should Read over his lifetime, “a library that centers on books that expand mind and soul, build new mental models, allowing you to become more culturally literate and thus better able to participate in the ‘Great Conversation.’”3 (Lord knows we could use more cultural literacy out there.) Among the works of Jane Austen, Aristotle, and The Art of War by Sun Tzu; Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and Herodotus; The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Orwell’s 1984, and Self-Control: Its Kinship and Majesty, you’ll find one sports book, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. This book is “inspiring enough to make a man hope for another shot on the diamond and join a local soft ball crew.”4 But it also addresses the “big ideas” that philosophers, theologians, and artists have mulled over for thousands of years: What is justice? What is true friendship? What is love? What is honor? How do you live a good life? In The Boys of Summer, not only does Kahn explore such questions, but also, as he brings out, does each man on the team. [End Page 1] The title was the spark. Kahn traces the idea for his book to the evening in 1952 when he heard Dylan Thomas “sonorously” recite in tones of surpassing beauty, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin . . .”5 Over the years ideas for the book evolved, but “baseball became [his] magic portal.”6 The boys of summer, the pleasant lilt of those five syllables, the soft vowels, the bucolic connotations are only part of the first line of the poem. Kahn quotes the complete line prominently on its own page following the table of contents. Clearly it resonated with him. If your eyes are rolling, “This is a baseball journal, lady,” you won’t be surprised that Kahn’s publishers balked at the title. It comes from a poem? Poetry doesn’t sell. “Safely, prosaically, dully,” Kahn’s editor wanted to call the book The Team.7 It took months of debate for Kahn to prevail. Why did he insist? “Is there one basic point to all fine poetry?” Kahn had asked Robert Frost. “The phrase . . . a clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart.”8 And that is why The Boys of Summer and not The Team became the title of Kahn’s book. The Team conjures naught, while The Boys of Summer is so loaded with color and suggestion it became a baseball meme, a synonym for ballplayers in their fleeting prime.9 In 1959 Kahn wrote an article about Babe Ruth for Esquire, in which he stated, “I set down the big man as he really was, with the booze, the babes, the insensitivity, the excess, as well as the howitzer homeruns.” Kahn was creating innovative sports journalism, he says, “hard- edged but not cruel . . . making a hero mortal but scarcely ordinary.”10 That article won the E. P. Dutton Prize for best sports magazine article of the year, reinforcing the approach, Kahn says, that was critical to The Boys of Summer. “In an era of hero worship,” Carl Erskine said, “Kahn...

Symbolic Meanings In The Road Not Taken Poetry By Robert Frost

Each symbol that exist in every poetry has its significant depth meaning that not everyone can casually understand. Although, poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature that exits, and its rhyme and symbols that deliver to indicate every further meaning that needed for. This study will try to deliver the symbolizes that exist in one of poetry created by Robert Frost, entitled The Road not Taken. This masterpiece has indicated a depth meaning that none could easily allocated, even understands by only managing to read the poetry only once. The collected data will be based on to find the symbols in the poetry, The Road not Taken by Robert Frost and the source of the data will be taken based on the same titled literary work. The writer will writes down every stanzas of the literary work then afterwards the writer will tries to describe every part of the stanzas meaning based on how the symbol exist in the poetry. Robert Frost is one of poet that significantly managed to use symbols in most of his works. By allocating the symbols into the literary work, one can find the depth meaning of every word in the stanza of the said work, to understand more to the fullest. The Road not Taken had gives certain impact which allows readers to understand that we have to thoroughly and deeply choose what kind of path we like to walk into to. Every part of certain poetry has their significant symbols that managed to utter the meaning of the said poetry. Poetry has brought significant gift thorough humanity’s life, as one artwork that only exist within contained beautiful words that formed based on only language.

The Ethical Mystery of the Sphinx Riddle

This thesis embarks upon a polemic trek by poring over the origin of human ethical consciousness in Adam and Eve after their eating of the Tree of Good and Evil in the Bible, then goes on to explore the ethical mystery of the Sphinx Riddle in Greek Mythology, illustrate the ethical dilemma of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s renowned drama, and finally wind up with a new vision on Robert Frost’s poem with Lawrence’s idea of the Noble Wild Beast. Believing that there has appeared the binary of animality and rationality in man since the Biblical time, this thesis believes that human beings have repeatedly prized rationality over animality, emphasized ethical order over native desire, thus adoring knowledge and power while despising emotion and love. It tries to explore into such questions as: Why does God forbid Adam and Eve from plucking from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Is Eve making a sort of ethical choice by eating the Forbidden Fruit? What is the ethical significance of Sphinx itself?

Literature Is Us and We Are Literature: Global and Universal Perspective

This paper takes into view literature on a global scale and from throughout time to investigate what we can say about its general and specific relevance for human society. The issue raised here pertains not only to the relevance of literature per se, but specifically to the question of how it relates to us as human beings, defining us in endless ways. In order to illustrate the central points addressed in this paper, numerous examples from the Middle Ages to the modern world are drawn from, such as Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (1335), Bertolt Brecht’s ballads, and Robert Frost’s modern poetry. The conclusion emphasizes that the critical function of literature in all human societies cannot be overestimated. At the risk of preaching to the converted, here we are confronted with the ultimate challenge in the Humanities once again. Insofar as literature has always mirrored, or engaged with, the fundamental issues in human life, we can establish its function as life-determining in philosophical, religious, political, ethical, or moral terms.

Brutalne wersy. Przemiany norm gatunkowych literackiego horroru a translatorskie strategie polskich popularyzatorów poezji grozy – przypadek antologii Roberta Stillera i Leszka Lachowieckiego

Violent Verses. Transformations of Horror Fiction and Translational Strategies of Polish Popularizers of Gothic Poetry – the Case Study of Anthologies by Robert Stiller and Leszek Lachowiecki The article discusses strategies used in translation of horror poetry in Polish anthologies of this genre in late 1980s and early 1990s when, thanks to political and social transformation, Western popculture with some of its characteristic features became available and popular in Poland. Comparative analysis of the selected translations collected in the volume Danse macabre (1993) by Leszek Lachowiecki, compared to their English, French or German originals (by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Vachel Lindsay, Charles Baudelaire and Georg Heym) and earlier Polish versions by Robert Stiller (published in 1986), proves that the later variants amplify and/or introduce numerous lexical items denoting or connotating violence, fear and disgust. Thus, the techniques used by Lachowiecki – aimed at a brutalization of language and emphasising the themes of cruelty, terror and dread – can be perceived as an application of old-fashion style and means (typical for modernist or “Young Poland” literature) in order to adjust aesthetic standards used in poetry to broader cultural trends dominating in contemporary horror fiction.

Comparative Analysis of Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening and Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798

The present paper attempts to compare and analyze two marvelous poems of all time, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’ and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ composed by the two highly philosophical poets William Wordsworth, who was a stalwart in the galaxy of Romantic poetry and the most celebrated American poet of 20th century, Robert Frost. The comparison has been made based on the themes, structure, poetic temperament and setting so as to bring differences and similarities between the poems. Objective of study • To bring out the comparative analysis between the poems. • To understand the poems deeply and understand the essence to see the similarities and differences of the poems. • To bring out the conclusions out of this comparative study. • To understand the different structures and styles of the poems to understand its uniqueness.

Indicting Frost for Androcentric Speciesism: An Ecofeminist Reading of Robert Frost’s “The Most of It”

Using the critical framework of ecofeminism, this paper examines Robert Frost’s attitudes towards both women and nature in his poem “The Most of It”. Whether ecocritical or feminist, the mainstream readings of Robert Frost fall into two main axes: 1) Frost for Nature and/or Women Views argue that Frost’s poetry is for nature and women (Srivastava, 2017; Shah, 2022); and 2) Frost for Ambiguity Views claim that Frost’s poetic work is ambiguous—it could be for or against nature and women (Benin, n.d). This paper belongs to neither of the two. This study makes it unequivocally clear that Frost's view of nature, in “The Most of It”, is androcentric as well as anthropomorphic. Ecofeminism is about making connections, on the one hand, between the earth and the entire forms of life on it, and on the other hand, between the patriarchal exploitation of nature and women’s domination. This paper, too, attempts establishing many connections: between the poet’s use of the male generic language and the oppression of nature and women; between the female’s invisibility in the poem and women’s domination in the Western patriarchal culture; and between Frost’s fame as a poet and his advocacy (through his poetry) for the androcentric worldviews of the patriarchal American society of his time. The findings of this research reveal that “The Most of It” contains strata of male-centric, speciesist worldviews and, consequently, stress the need for more research into Frost’s oeuvre using ecofeminist theory.

Robert frost’s conception about poetry

Poetry cannot be compared so any other forms of art except for certain reasons. Otherwise it is that branch of literature which has got more dependence on the emotions that reasons. A prose writer may have to write a lot of drive home a point. But a poet needs only a few words to express a whole gamut of thoughts. In poetry the poet has got enough freedom to handle theme in the way be desire, Robert Frost had its own conception about poetry. He believed that it should be a “Clarification of life.

Interpreting Robert Frost’s Work Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening from a Metaphorical Perspective

Interpreting Robert Frost’s Work Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening from a Metaphorical Perspective

A Comparative Analysis of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson’s Vision of Nature

A Comparative Analysis of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson’s Vision of Nature

Questioning Nature: A Study of Death and Isolation in Selected Nature Poems by Robert Frost

This study aims to discuss the themes of death and isolation in selected nature poems by Robert Frost, the reasons behind this odd employment of nature, the relationship between death and isolation, and how one begets the other. The assumptions and principles of psychoanalytical and biographical approaches provide the theoretical framework for this dissertation, namely, through examining the life of Frost, as well as psychic exhaustion and traumas which reveal the unconscious motives behind his use of the themes of death and isolation in his nature poems. To answer the study’s questions, it focuses on studying those poems by going over the symbols and figures of speech that present the challenging, gloomy picture of nature, which single out Frost from other American and English poets’ images of nature.

Prosodic Cues of Narrative Segmentation in Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’: A Phono-Pragmatic Exploration

There is much research on the syntax-semantics and the syntax-phonology interaction. However, the exact relation between prosodic patterns and informational structure (as part of pragmatics) is still to be investigated. In this empirical study, we challenge the view that prosody and pragmatics are two autonomous levels of grammar. This paper is an analysis of the narrative poem ‘Mending Wall’ recited by Robert Frost to explore the prosodic features and the associated pragmatic meanings. It is proposed that a set of intentionally manipulated suprasegmental features form a prosodic grammar that works in line with syntax and lexical choices to build the narrative discourse and achieve pragmatic meanings. The paper shows that the amalgamation of certain prosodic features is manipulated to signal certain sections of the narrative and participate in segmenting the story into sections. Since the narrative structure is thought to be universal, we think that the procedures followed can be easily applied to other languages.

The Oriental Journey -A Trajectory in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

This article is an attempt to explore the prospects of transitioning from alienation to acculturation. The ability to change the bitterness of alienation into the sweetness of acculturation lies in the hands of the immigrant. The Mistress of spices through the characters in the novel divulges the secret of acculturation along with its hitches and the requisite for acculturation. Having made it to the host land, it is good for the immigrant to stop brooding over situations and work on settling down. At times, the immigrant might have to resort to the road less travelled, as suggested by Robert Frost in his poem, The Road Not Taken, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference”.The diasporic phase should no longer be a battle of the minds but rather a platform for a growth mindset. As the shifting of tectonic plates creates new territories and new horizons, it is high time that a shift in the diasporic mindset is observed. One of the unique features of a growth mindset is to use the roadblocks of migration as opportunities for learning. Migration is a good time to understand and experience the wholesome culture of the place, to dissect the experiences of myth and misconception and fact from fiction, firsthand, in tandem with the sharing of cultural best practices and customs of the homeland.

The Blue-Collar Sun by Lucas Farrell

Reviewed by: The Blue-Collar Sun by Lucas Farrell Laura C. Stevenson (bio) the blue-collar sun Lucas Farrell Green Writers Press https://www.ipgbook.com/the-blue-collar-sun-products-9781733653459.php?page_id=21 80 pages; Print, $16.95 Lucas Farrell, whose the blue-collar sun won the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award, is a Vermont farmer. The combination of farming, poetry, and Vermont may conjure up an image of Robert Frost, but a century clearly separates Farrell's generation from Frost's. Big Picture Farm, which Farrell owns with his wife, the artist Louisa Conrad, includes a B&B and a confectionery as well as a flock of forty goats. Farrell's poetry is similarly twenty-first century, inclined to experiments in form and structure that extend considerably beyond playing tennis without a net. Like all good poetry, however, it is based on nuanced observation of the world. The prose poem "Sugaring," for instance, begins with a wittily apt description of the conditions under which sap is collected: "The snowy fields have softened to a raw chèvre." The poetry also contain startling lines that linger long with the reader once the book is closed, for example, "The world is hard to find once you start looking for it." The book is divided into four parts. The first, "this is your animal," consists of nine short poems, mostly written since Farrell and Conrad set up their farm. The next three sections are products of the artist's residency the pair spent in Skagaströnd, Iceland, during 2009. The second part, "i approached a little farewell," is an erasure set in nonconsecutive pages of the Nobel Prize–winning [End Page 129] novel Under the Glacier (1968), by Halldór Laxness, as translated by Magnus Magnusson. In 2010, some of its poems appeared in collaboration with Conrad's art in the exhibit To the Thawing Wind at the Freies Museum in Berlin (https://emilietrice-portfolio.com/to-the-thawing-wind). The third part, "the blue-collar sun," was published as a chapbook in 2009 by Alice Blue Books. And the fourth part, "a description of the hook i am capable of," was initially published in DIAGRAM (2010) with Conrad's illustrations and photographs, some of which are beautifully reproduced here. The result is a collection of works that are, as Farrell has pointed out in a recent interview with Literary North, as different from each other as the seasons in Vermont (https://literarynorth.org/blog/2021/4/1/interview-lucas-farrell). The simile is apt, but like the order of the book's parts, it implies sequential poetic development, starting with the shorter initial pieces and progressing to the ambitious longer works. In fact, the reverse is true. The last three sections, which date back twelve years, are rhetorical experiments with the boundaries between poetry and prose; their content is much influenced by the effects of climate change just below the Arctic Circle. The influence is visually portrayed in the erasure, where instead of blacking out the text of Laxness's Under the Glacier, Farrell has had it printed in light gray, so that while still readable, it seems to be fading. Against that disappearing background, Farrell's poem, printed in black, stands out as starkly as a glacial erratic: [End Page 130] The same sense of ecological loss touches the prose poem-essay "a description of the hook I am capable of," which contains, among meditations on a fishhook stuck in Conrad's boot, a portrait of the fishing village in which she and Farrell lived during their residency, and from which they could walk along the Atlantic coast. To where a band of old warehouses was once erected to serve a particular function they no longer serve. And in that way, they are just like the hook. The short of it is that these warehouses used to process a kind of fish that is no longer fished here. And not just here, but anywhere really. The herring that used to sustain the village have been fished into extinction, "Which itself results in a superabundance of hooks." The meditation continues with thoughts on the complicated village, all of whose...

The Medawar Prize Acceptance Speech 2022.

The Medawar Prize Acceptance Speech 2022.