Modern: Robert Frost

A traditionalist in form and a Modern in subject matter. He is not strictly a humanist, and not strictly a nature poet. He writes about people for whom the present has been too much of a burden, who have been physically, psychologically, mentally, and spirtually worn out. They seek refuge in the past, in isolation, insanity, solitude, and even death. He writes about the individual's limits in relation to nature. He treats his rural landscapes, not in a nostalgic or sentimental way, but frequently as a place of escape or refuge, isolation, and eccentricity. A shadow of melancholy and sorry often overcasts his poetry. His poetry often deals with the processes of the natural world, but not in a comforting or reassuring way, as in Bryant and Whitman. Rather the natural world is a place of threat, fear, and death. The woods are a moral desert -- wild, untamed, uncivilized, and lawless. This view could be seen as a similar to the views of the early Puritans, except that he offers no assurance of salvation in the so-called civilized places rather (farm, village, city, etc). In fact, he portrays the outer world as a desert that mirrors the desert of the inner self. He offers no large or lasting solutions; his "truths" are only monetary. He saw modern despair and new deal politics as equally dangerous in subverting the will and ability of the individual to act Frost wrote his poems in the common language of informal speech, which runs counter to the formal quality of his verse. His strict forms seem to represent an attempt to control the power of the creative imagination, to impose order on chaos. In his writings, he made many memorable statements about poetry:

• Art strips life to form
• Poetry is a way of remembering what you didn't know you knew
• Poetry is a clarification of life
• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom
• A poem is a momentary stay against confusion

Until Lionel Trilling's famous toast at Frost's 85th birthday party in 1959, the prevailing view of Frost was of kindly old man dispensing homely bits of folk wisdom through his poems: "Good fences make good neighbors," etc. Frost with his white suits and white hair and avancular public persona, deliberately played this role as well. Trilling, however, in calling him "the poet of adrenalin" and "the bard of terror," succeeded in opening critics' eyes to the hard edge of Frost irony and pessimism. A couple of Frost's other statements about poetry seem to reflect this darker view:

• Poetry is written in a kind of code so the wrong people won't understand and be saved.
• Poetry is a means of taking life by the throat.

• Not modernist in form; but great ironist
• King of Irony/Master
• Dark twist even if they don't mean to
• all wisdom is suspect - anyone who says they have it should be eyed with suspicion
• Regionalist
• Nature
• Writes about nature, but not comforting like Whitman
• about death and threatening things
• Writes in blank verse
• didn't like free verse
• pays attention to reader's impressions of his poetry
• how sounds make you feel
• Ironic intentions
• so wrong people don't understand the meaning
• Common vernacular

"Birches"

• About swinging on trees
• Shows "swinging motion" between ideas he discusses
• Transcendence ideals - swings upward and doesn't want to come back down

"Road not taken"

• Paths were actually the same
• will go back down the other day, but he may actually not
• contradictory intentions
• hasn't made all the difference
• wants to go back, but may never
• sighs, showing lack of care
• Road less traveled - really doesn't matter

"Snowy Evening"

• Death/dying

Mending wall

• helping neighbor build wall
• alienation/isolation

Home burial

• Interpretations
• Freud