American Literature

Department Of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

Name: Bhatt Vidhi Rajeshkumar

Roll No.: 04

SEM: 03

Year: 2012-13

Subject: American Literature

Assignment Topic: Robert Frost’s Poetic Style

Submitted To: Heenaba Zala

Robert Frost’s Poetic Style

Introduction:-

              Robert Frost one of the greatest of American Poets one whose name is well familiar in India because his poetry was a source of comfort and inspiration to no less a person than Jawaharlal Nehru. It was in 1912, that frost decided to make poetry vocation in life. He became of the first American poets who were invited to live on the campus of various institutes as poets-in-residence. He was elected to the membership of the National Institutes of Arts and Letters in 1916, to membership in the American Academy in 1930. Four times he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

               Frost’s style is plain, lucid and belongs to a tradition of discursive style. Within this tradition, however, there are variations to be found. The strength and stability of Frost’s world, in brief are those of the resources of syntax, based on the belief in the qualities of clarity and coherence. But metonomy has its limitations. It restricts the poet’s interests to a world of facts and literal details. Frost is, however, as he has claimed for himself, a synedochist.

               Robert frost is one of few poets in English literature who shall never become outdated of his poetry is an echo of every sensitive man’s experiences and his limitations.

               The poems which Robert Frost composed or reworked in those days are basically philosophical and deal with familiar but remote themes. The main theme of his poetry is the despairing state man in life. Robert Frost has tried to communicate again and again that man’s effort to gather happiness and love of his fellowman in the universe.

               In his poems, Frost holds his theme in isolation, and presents it in all its starkness and without any reference to the larger world.

Robert Frost as a Regional poet

              Robert Frost was always a regional poet, and his region was New England, more practically one of two best states in the USA, the other being Vermont. He never felt slightest desire to include all America within the scope of his poetry. But at the same time, he never tried to bring his characters into regional unity and did not dream of Utopia for them. “Frost is best known the best known to the public as the poet of New England. Like Faulkner, he stands forth as both the interpreter and representative of regional; culture”.

                                                                                            -John Lynen

           The New England provides with stories, attitudes, characters which are appropriate to his need. He falls in love with New England tradition and it gives him strength. His subjects are usually characters, events or creatures of rural New England. He deals with common places of the countryside. As some critic says, “Yet no poetry so regional has ever been so universal”. His title of books as New Hampshire, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval also show his attachment with his own region.

Robert Frost as Symbolist

Symbolism in general means a veiled or oblique mode of communication. A poem may have a surface meaning but it which is understood only through a closer scrutiny of the poem. Many of Robert Frost’s poems are capable of symbolic interpretation.

The surface meaning of “Mending Wall”, for instance is: “Good Fences make Good Neighbors”. But symbolically the poem states one of the serious problems of our times should natural boundaries be made stronger for our protections or should they be removed because they restrict our progress towards international brotherhood?

“Stopping By Woods…” is a symbolic statement of the conflict which everyone has left between the demands of practical life, with its obligations to others, and the poignant desire to escape into a land of day-dreaming and reverie. The dark woods silently filling up with coldness of snow symbolizes death, which has a strength attraction for the speaker of the poem. But the speaker turns away from the call of woods, because he decides with certain weariness and yet with quiet determination to face the needs and demands of life.

                               “The woods are lovely, dark and deep

                                                But I have promises to keep,

                                 And Miles to go before I sleep,

                                                And Miles to go before I sleep.”

In “Stopping by Woods in Snowy Evening”, Frost has created a new kind of symbolism postoralism. As John Lynen says, “The Indirect and subtly suggestive quality of its symbolism results from his preference. For implication rather than explicit statement. He does not interpret the scene; he uses it as the medium through which to review the reality”.

Profundity, Lucidity and Subtlety in Robert Frost’s poetry

There is subtly in Robert Frost through this subtlety makes itself known to the reader only with the continued reading. But a unique quality in Frost is that our understanding of his poems at first reading does not to do violence to the ultimate understanding which comes only after we have been familiar with those poems for years.

In actual fact, certain basis changes kept taking place in Frost, though the lucidity of his verse tended to obscure, the complexities of his development. His lucidity is such that there is always our easily understood meaning or image for the reader.

Although his poems are often subtle and complex, their surface simplicity and lucidity attract excellent introduction to the study of poetry. As John Lynen says, “Frost’s rural world is interesting because it symbolizes the world we ourselves know. Our main concern must be to discover how he has shaped his world as an image of every man’s experience”.

Robert Frost is deep and profound artist and we may say that a skilful combination of outer lightness and an inner gravity is one of the poetic achievements. His poems chart his own inner world.

Robert Frost as a serious Artist whose poetry overflows naturally, effortless and spontaneously

Robert Frost virtually dedicated his whole life to poetry: this is the proof of his seriousness as an artist. However, he was not the kind of poet who tries to analyze his poetic talent deeply into the source of his poetic gift. So we may that Frost’s poems have a simple, unforced and lyric charm. They seem to have been written as naturally and effortlessly as breathing. As Ezra Pound says, “This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to pain the thing, the thing as he sees it”.

His technique is so flexible, his handling of language and cadence so careful and dedicate that he is able to give his most elegant poems the air of spontaneity. His ideas thus appear not as preconceived notions, but as sudden discoveries. His best poetry conveys the very process of thought and speculation.

Robert Frost as the poet loneliness and isolation (Death and Despair)

Many of his poems are about the sense of isolation, the feeling of loneliness which regards not as a peculiarity American dilemma but a universal situation. A circumstance in Frost’s personal life too contributed to the theme of isolation or alienation in Frost’s sister, Jeanie had been showing signs of mental unbalance. By degree she became totally alienated from the world.

Frost’s sadness in being unable to dissuade his sister from his view of things is strikingly similar to the plight of the husband in the poem, Home Burial. The young woman in this poem cannot like Janie accept the facts of her situation she cannot reconcile herself to death of her child, with the result that she becomes totally estranged from her husband.

As Louis Untermeyer says, “Frost work, like his life, is built on paradox. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that it is the combination and resolution of contradictions. The poetry is sunny and somber; tasty and tragic.”

Mending Wall deals with man’s willful separation from man. The old style farmer in Mending Wall not only refuses to pull down the useless barriers but to make matters worse insists on having the last word, “Good Fences Makes Good Neighbors”.  

Psychological Analyst and his character-portrayal

Some of the poems of Frost make a psycho-analytical approach to the characters they depict. This concern with psycho-analyses is another feature of Frost’s modernity. Robert Frost would seem to be exploring. The unconscious mind in those poems, even though he may not have directly been influenced by Freud. Some of his poems deal with abnormal psychology. They deal with eccentric, even macabre human behavior. The characters in those poems tend to be lonely neurotic figures there is the over wrought mother in the Home Burial who is cracking up under a burden of grief over her child’s death.

Robert Frost embodies his characters full of blood and flesh, penetrating into their minds deeply with keen insight and depth and bringing not into facts their actions, movements, speeches steeped with psycho-analytical power.

Dramatic and Narrative quality in Robert Frost’s poetry

Poetry was to Robert Frost essentially dramatic whatever his theme may be, he dramatizes it for the readers, establishing full scenes of a situation and atmosphere realistically, whether it be the tragedy of the hired man or the relation of a boy to heaven flung birches which he subdues one by one. The most dramatic moment in a poem by Frost is the kind of denouement when the world fact achieves its full metaphysical significance.

In Home Burial, the scenes and dialogue, characters with complete narrative skill are as shown as we see a stage-play.

Lyrical Quality in Robert Frost’s poetry

In many of his best known poems Robert Frost employs the oldest of old ways to be new, namely the lyric form. The essential feature of a lyric is its musicality; and a lyric achieve its musical effects by traditional techniques of meter, rhyme and stanzaic patterns i.e. “Stopping by Woods…”

Self-revelation in Robert Frost’s poetry

Robert Frost like true poets reveals himself in everything he writes. As Ezra Pound, “One reads the book for the tone which is homely and pleasing; never doubting that it comes direct from his own experience”.

Metaphysical element in Frost’s poetry

Robert Frost is a metaphysical poet in the tradition of Emerson and Emily Dickenson. This means that he tries to go beyond the seen and to unseen. As in all great metaphysical poetry, the tension increases between the simple feet and the mastery which surrounds it, until the total meaning flashes in the final morals.