Paper 303- American Literature

 

Assignment: Paper E-C-303,

Topic: Robert Frost as a poet

Student's Name - Pooja N. Trivedi, 

Roll No - 18 

M. A. Part II, Semester - III,

Submitted To - Dr. Dilip Barad, 

                        Department of English,

                        Bhavnagar University,

                        Bhavnagar.

ROBERT FROST AS A POET…

           As Frost’s poetry originates in the experiences of an original, ordinary man, it clings to the thrust of existence and is not an account of the glorious possibilities of life. Hence it is essential to have a backward glance over the long span of life of his life to know what made Frost, Frost. Like the great masters of the past – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman, Frost’s significance too was steeped in the spirit of the age. Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters.

“The purest classical poet of America to-day”, “the one great American poet of our times”, and, a New Englander in the , “great tradition, fit to be placed beside Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau.” He has been called “THE VOICE OF AMERICA”

"Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet," writes James M. Cox, "it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor point out in Poems for Study,

"Frost's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." (p.63)

Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

Frost’s poem ‘My Butterfly’, which he wrote at a single stork, was the beginning of his great carrier. It was the beginning of “ME” (p.5) as Frost put it. It confirmed his faith in his own poetic talent, and paved the way for his poetic aesthetic that poetry is “like blush-you can get something you didn’t know you had”(p.6), and that a poet’s growth is like “a water spout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all other poets he ever read.” (p.7).  

He embraced all calmly like the bird in Acceptance and wished only to be left safe with poetry. As the details of Frost’s life and poetry confirm, he was emerging little by little from his isolation and gaining confidence. Frost's importance as a poet derives from the power and memorability of particular poems and certain characteristics of his poems.

The first thing which strikes the eye is the extreme simplicity of his poetry. He writes of the simplest subjects, and he says what he has to say in the most lucid and simple manner. It is this quality of him which has pleased him to ordinary readers. However, the simplicity of Frost’s poetic art has something deceptive about it. Speaking about it Jennings remarked, “His stark simplicities are the simplicities a man finds after much experience and a great deal of painful self-questioning.” A careful reading of his poems reveal that he is extraordinary subtle, complex and intricate. They have a rich texture, and there are layers within layers of meanings. The poetic technique adopted by Frost which makes him a distinctive poet is symbolism. “The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from one another mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbors in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.

Unlike Romantics he has taken notice of both the bright and dark aspects of nature as we see in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking turmoil and storms:

Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath

In fact the world of nature in Frost’s poetry is not a world of dream. It is much more harsh, horrible and hostile than the modern urban world. Hence his experience of the pastoral technique to comment on the human issue of modern world his realistic treatment of Nature, his employment of symbolic and metaphysical techniques and the projection of the awareness of human problems of the modern society in his poetry justly entitle him to be looked up to as modern poet.

In his well-known poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ knits the rich symbolism in concluding lines of the poem.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promise to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

A skillful combination of an outer lightness with an inner gravity is one his major poetic achievements.

Further, Frost brings several elements in his poetry that gives him unique place in the queue of the greatest American poets and writers. The first essential element is the ‘Pastoral’ features that Frost describes in his poems. Frost is perhaps most famous for being a pastoral poet in terms of the subject of everyday life. Many of his most famous poems (such as “Mending Wall” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) are inspired by the natural world, particularly his time spent as a poultry farmer in New Hampshire. Frost clarified his interest in the pastoral world as a subject for his poetry, writing: “Poetry is more often of the country than the city…Poetry is very, very rural – rustic. It might be taken as a symbol of man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use.” Yet Frost does not limit himself to expressing the pastoral only in terms of beauty and peace, as in a traditional sense. Instead, he also chooses to emphasize the harsh conflicts of the natural world: the clash between urban and rural lifestyles, the unfettered emotions and struggles inherent in rural life, even the sense of loss and simultaneous growth that accompanies the changing of the seasons.

Characteristics common to Robert Frost's poetry include traditional formal verse, and themes that deal with the natural landscape and dark meditations on human existence. Much of Frost's work includes reflections on New England, but he was not purely a regional poet; his words spoke to universal human experiences.

Secondly, Frost is a great nature-poet. He writes of the natural scenes and sights, flora and fauna, hills and dales, of the region which lie north of Boston. He found beauty and meaning in commonplace objects, such as a drooping birch tree and an old stone wall, and drew universal significance from the experiences of a farmer or a country boy. Like Wordsworth, his love of nature is limited to nature in a particular district. But unlike Wordsworth, he loves both her pleasant and unpleasant aspects. He enjoys her sensuous beauty, but he is also alive to much that is harsh, bleak and barren in her. He does not shut his eye to her harshness and cruelty. His approach is realistic. He was a working farmer and no working farmer can be romantic about nature. As W.H. Auden has pointed out, Frost’s, "Poems on natural objects are always concerned with them not as fact for mystical mediation or starting points for fantasy, but as things with which, and on which, man acts in the course of the daily work of gaining a livelihood." Nevertheless, Frost's use of nature is the single most misunderstood element of his poetry. Frost said over and over, "I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems." Most of Frost's poems use nature imagery. His grasp and understanding of natural fact is well recognized. However Frost is not trying to tell us how nature works. His poems are about human psychology.

Robert Frost saw nature as an alien force capable of destroying man, but he also saw man's struggle with nature as an heroic battle. As told in his poem "Our Hold on the Planet",

 

There is much in nature against us. But we forget:

Take nature altogether since time began,

Including human nature, in peace and war,

And it must be a little more in favor of man,

He does not find any 'holy plan' at work in nature, nor does he regard her as a kindly mother watching benevolently over man. In his view, Nature and man are two separate principles, and it is futile to search for friendship in the external world. He constantly emphasizes the difference, rather than the similarity, between man and nature. There are no other signs of love, friendship and sympathy. Inseparable barriers divide man from Nature.

Though Frost is a great nature-poet, he is still greater as a poet of man. As Untermeyer tells us, "Robert Frost has written on almost every subject. He has illuminated things as common as a wood pile and as uncommon as a pre­historic people, as natural as a bird singing in its sleep and as mechanistic as the revolt of a factory worker. But his central subject is humanity. His poetry lives with a particular aliveness because it expresses living people.

Other poets have written about people. But Robert Frost's poems are the people; they work and walk about and converse, and tell their stories with the freedom of common speech. "People in Frost's books are all rural New Englanders. He knew them intimately and his portrayal of them is realistic and vivid. Writes Marcus Conliffe in this connection, "his poetry has cropped out of his farmer's world, every part of which he knows, and knows how to render it in words with a brilliant, off-hand ease. His reticent, poor, dignified New Englanders are evoked in monologues, a little like those of E.A. Robinson, or of Robert Browning, but with a difference. His people speak cautiously and intervals of silence, making each word count. Valuability would be alien to them. They do not go on and on, as in Robinson, or explode, as in Browning. Their lonely farms, the cold winters and all-to-brief summers; the imminence of failure, of the wilderness, of death—all give one the sense of people loving tensely. The tension comes out in the poetry and the moments of relaxation have by contrast an almost extravagant gaiety. The hardl-hood, to repeat, is that of life in New Hampshire, as such, not that imposed by the poet, though, of course, Frost describes it with a professional mastery." Frost's range or characters are beyond his range, and he shows great artistic self-restraint in staying within his range. But working within his range, he achieves great vividness, diversity and subtlety.

Apart from his richness of thematic concerns, symbolism, pastoral element, deceptive simplicity, one additional tendency that adds into the greatness of Frost is, Frost is a great with words. His words are carefully chosen both with reference to their sense and soundhe painstakingly revised and polished what he wrote and tried to express himself with utmost economy, with result that many of his lines have an epigrammatic quality and he has the habit of understatement also. Elizabeth Jenning notices this aphoristic quality of verse. (cite)

Epigrammatic lines like………

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

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.

We love the things we love for what they are.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

     

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Says Mark Van Doren, ……………

Thus, Frost with his trust in the original impulse took the risk of being free from conventionality, even though it meant to be lost only to find him out with the strong beliefs. This makes Frost stand in the parallel line with the great thinkers and philosophers who formed the cultural and intellectual history of America. However Frost, in spite of their generous legacy, did not allow anything to restraint his intellectual curiosity. He travelled in their domain but he maintained his own integrity. Combining in himself the thoughts of the intellectuals and the experiences of the common man, Frost contributed to the culture of the age in more democratic terms which enabled him to memorialized the rural New England and its simple folks in particular and the common, human being in general. This makes Frost not only a modern American poet whom Donald Adams adored but a modern American poet whom Trilling admired. No doubt, he began under the cloud of other poets and philosophers but the source of his strength lay in himself “Into my own” (p.21), in his own “beliefs” (p.22), poetic or otherwise.

"Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken.”