‘’Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’’
-Robert Frost (Mountain Interval 1920)
The annals of poetry have seldom seen poetry as effortless as Frost’s. Seemingly simple, his poems are thought provoking, creating an impression on first time readers instantly. Frost is the Father Christmas of literature; with something for everybody. His writing style protects his poems from becoming obsolete, appealing to the aesthetics of readers across ages. He is revered for his strong command on the colloquial American dialogue which makes his poems appear real for laymen, as if they were part of an easily flowing, universally understood dialogue.
This very style of Frost has led to him facing immense criticism by skeptics in favors of the modernist approach to poetry. The modernists define their poetry’s individuality by taking a step away from the done to death personal statements towards more intellectual meanings deep-rooted within their prose. The modernists view poetry as a key weapon in making intellectual statements about the world to bring about changes in thoughts. In characterizing a synopsis of Frost's style, Kay Ryan of the Poetry Foundation places his work "at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry [with regard to his use of traditional forms] and modernism [with his use of idiomatic language and ordinary, everyday subject matter]." (Ryan) Frost’s uniquely amalgamating style has been made vulnerable in contrast to other poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson who also set the backdrop of their poems in New England’s natural setting. In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair harshly conclude that Frost’s poetry was "less [consciously] literary" and that his poems ultimately “show a successful striving for utter colloquialism". (Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair, 1998)This is perhaps due to his desire to remain deceptively simple and down to earth in his writing style or due to an ulterior motive of reaching out to the comprehensive levels of the masses. It must be kept in mind that Frost did not lack a literary background and that this style that came to mark his work was actually a result of conscious cognition. His allegiance to literature classics was both ‘strong’ and continuous throughout his lifetime. (Newdick, 1940)Added to that is the fact that he was born to parents who told him classical stories during his childhood, so there is proof of his literary inclinations.(Newdick , 1940, p.403) It must also be noted that his earliest writings were inspired from literary classics, for example, upon reading Caesar’s De Bello Gallic in Latin, Frost got inspired to write one of his earliest poems; ‘A dream of Julius Caesar’ during his high school. ( Newdick,1940,p.404)
It was the classics that evolved his theory of ‘sentence sounds’ that he heavily embodied in the majority of his poems. Frost’s work hence extracts the essence of life; emotions and their expressions, and places this in his poems, which then speak for themselves and leave the reader in awe. Lawrence Thompson says in Robert Frost:the early years, that this enabled him to work in a direction developed by his ‘sense of sound’ that took him beyond the popular forces at that time, beyond the imagists, and beyond the Georgians.(Sears 1981) Frost’s view of life and the emotions depicted in it on a day to day basis was hence propagated in not just the content of his writing but also his writing style and theories.
Frost focused on the content of his poems, rather than coming up with new verse forms and perhaps this is the secret behind his enormous success as a poet. The beautiful concepts that he tried to depict through his work the mutability of all things that pass through our life. His poems like ‘Spring Pools’ , ‘Nothing Gold can stay’ and ‘Reluctance’ deal with the irreversible nature of seasons and the limited control we have over the mutability of life forms. ( Liebman,1996, p.418)
Frost pays a lot of importance to nature in his work as a continuing theme, and via his realistic depictions of rural and natural life, he indicates the realities of life. ‘The joys of summer are brief, and the losses brought about by the fall (both seasonal and theological) are experienced in winter as a kind of a spiritual death. In many poems such as ‘stars’, ‘Design’ and ‘once by the pacific’ Frost portrays the universe as indifferent to human needs and even destructive to human life/ existence. The human world is brimming with substantiations of violence and vanity. This is evident in Frost’s poems ‘ Pod of the milkweeds’, ‘ The bear’ and ‘The vanishing Red’. Moreover, the internal fears and doubts that are the primary cause of separation between men and women, the miscommunications that render life full of bitterness, and the isolation of beings that converts their hatred into hostility are documented throughout Frost’s poetry and specifically in ‘The North of Boston’. For Frost there exists a real situation and an ideal situation in life. The barrier dichotomizing the two can’t be penetrated and continues to afflict pessimism in life. Inklings of joy are hinted just as often in his poems, though he maintains the message that moments of joy are transitory in life. Yet he emphasizes the point that they remain instances of celebration despite their short lived nature. Even the slightest of events can be considered responsible for altering the communication between people, God and things. (Liebman,1996,p.418)This theme is explored in ‘The dust of snow’ whereby:
‘The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued’
Hence, joyous moments are provided in life by elements of nature or other trivial happenings and these may alter our mood and day’s outlook entirely, and as in this case even inspire the poet to write. In ‘Going for water’, Frost indicates a moment of awe and cherishment at the instantaneous union of the heavens and the earth, when the moonlight cats itself onto the surface of the water of the brook. The beauty lies in the miraculous vision of that precise moment and the brevity of the moment is sidelined at that point in time, whereby the beauty of life is cherished only. ( Liebman, 1996, p.419)
The visual use of natural elements creates a strong factor of relating in Frost’s poems and allows inference of metaphors if one ponders over the simple words. Sometimes these metaphors are used in contradiction to each other in his work, whereby some poems depict a certain life lesson using natural imagery, while others depict an entirely different one using the same symbol from nature. The stars that Frost so often mentions are just not meaningless symbols of the cosmos as exhibited in the ‘Stars’ and ‘Bond and Free’, rather, they are sometimes metaphors of stability and strong dependence as in ‘Take something like a star’ and sometimes used differently to depict eternal life, an example being ‘I will sing you one-o’. The use of flowers is not only to indicate the change of seasons as in ‘The last mowing’ and ‘The tuft of flowers’, but also a place of communal feelings to be cherished seeing the festivity that they bring about.(Liebman, 1996,p.419)
Robert Frost’s poems are beautiful in the way they incorporate his sense of place, and the universal relationship between nature and poetic aesthetics. As his critics often have noted, Frost aims to explore the very intention of the life giving universe and the intrinsic human values that are vested in life. He views the concrete elements in life as one would view the elements of a microcosm. This desire to explore the intrinsic workings of human life can be seen etched in many of his poems whereby ‘the fact starts as its own best symbol’ in ‘A stay against confusion’. (Francis, 1982, p.4)
Throughout his work critics have noticed that Frost was drawn to the sciences. From nature man emerges and therein he perishes, therefore it can be inferred that Frost’s interest in nature and man’s origins was directly related to man’s destiny and this phenomenon is evident in the complete poems. (Francis, 1982, p.5) In ‘why wait for science’ Frost cynically states that ‘the best way to leave the planet ‘ should be the same/ as fifty years ago we came’. (Francis, 1982, p.6) He mentions the passing of time, enveloping the life that exists at the moment in its dusty grip. As he depicts in ‘in the clearing’, mentioning a debt that is owed to the ‘passers of the past’ and the layers upon layers of footprints that have piled on top of each other over time. That debt is owed to them merely for’ having been there’ according to Frost. (Francis, 1982, p.6)
Hence, an in-depth analysis of Robert Frost’s work shows that certain themes are concurrent through his collection of poems and the notions of human existence and death specifically interested him in addition to the cabalistic notions of natural elements.
Bibliography
- Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair, (1998). The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition. New York: Norton.
- Francis, L. L. (1982). Robert Frost and the Majesty of Stones upon Stones. Journal of Modern Literature, 9(1), 3-26. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831273?seq=2&Search=yes&searchText=work&searchText=life&searchText=lee&searchText=death&searchText=frost&searchText=robert&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoAdvancedSearch%3Fq0%3Drobert%2Blee%2Bfrost%2Bwork%2Bon%2Blife%2Band%2Bdeath%26f0%3Dall%26c1%3DAND%26q1%3D%26f1%3Dall%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff%26Search%3DSearch%26sd%3D%26ed%3D%26la%3D%26pt%3D%26isbn%3D&prevSearch=&item=3&ttl=5771&returnArticleService=showFullText&resultsServiceName=null
- Liebman, S. W. (1996). Robert Frost, Romantic. Twentieth Century Literature, 42(4), 417-437. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/441875?seq=2&Search=yes&searchText=work&searchText=lee&searchText=frost&searchText=robert&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Blee%2Bfrost%2Bwork%26fromHomePage%3Dtrue%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff&prevSearch=&item=12&ttl=10908&returnArticleService=showFullText&resultsServiceName=null
- Newdick, R. S. (1940). Robert Frost and the classics. The Classical Journal, 35(7), 403-416. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3291259?seq=1&Search=yes&searchText=work&searchText=lee&searchText=frost&searchText=robert&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Drobert%2Blee%2Bfrost%2Bwork%26fromHomePage%3Dtrue%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff&prevSearch=&item=6&ttl=10908&returnArticleService=showFullText&resultsServiceName=null
- Ryan, K. (n.d.). Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost
- Robert frost. (n.d.). en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Frost#cite_note-20
- Sears, J. F. (1981). Robert Frost and the Imagists: The Background of Frost's "Sentence Sounds". The New England Quarterly, 54(4), 467-480. Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/365148?seq=2&Search=yes&searchText=work&searchText=life&searchText=lee&searchText=death&searchText=frost&searchText=robert&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoAdvancedSearch%3Fq0%3Drobert%2Blee%2Bfrost%2Bwork%2Bon%2Blife%2Band%2Bdeath%26f0%3Dall%26c1%3DAND%26q1%3D%26f1%3Dall%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff%26Search%3DSearch%26sd%3D%26ed%3D%26la%3D%26pt%3D%26isbn%3D&prevSearch=&item=20&ttl=5771&returnArticleService=showFullText&resultsServiceName=null
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