Robert Frost’s Poetic Style
The most of American of poets, Robert Frost was recognized not in his own country, but abroad, and his first two books were published in England. He never entered a competition and did not believe in prize contests yet the Pulitzer Prize for the best poetry of the year was awarded to him for four times. President Kennedy called Robert Frost, “The great American poet of our time” and described him thus. “His life and his art summed up the essential qualities of the New England, he loved so much: the fresh delight in Nature, the plainness of speech, the canny wisdom, and deep underlying insight into the human soul.”
Aldlai Stevenson paid him the following tribute: “In Robert Frost, the American people have found their poet, their singer, their seer—–in short their bard.”
Robert Frost As A Regional Poet
Robert Frost was always a regional poet, and his region was New England, more practically New Hampshire which he considered 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. As John Lynen says, “Frost is the best known to the public as the poet of New England. Like Faulkner, he stands forth as both the interpreter and the representative of his regional culture.”
The New England provides him with stories, attitudes, characters, which are appropriate to his needs. He falls in love with New England tradition and it gives him strength. The literary tradition into which his work broadly fits is a pastoral one. His subjects are usually characters, events or creatures of rural New England. He deals with the commonplaces of the countryside——-Apple Picking, Hey-Making, Sleep of an Old Man Alone in an Old Farm House, Cleaning Of Pasture, Springs, interpreting a universal touch to his regionalism. As some critic says, “Yet no poetry so regional has ever been so universal. His titles 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 may also have deeper significance which is understood only through a closer scrutiny of the poem. Many of R. Frost’s poems are capable of a symbolic interpretation.
The surface meaning of “Mending Wall”, for instance is: “Good Fences make good neigbours.” But symbolically the poem states one of the serious problems of our times. Should natural boundaries be made stronger for our protection, or should they be removed because they restrict our progress towards international brotherhood?
“The Road Not Taken”, symbolically deals with the choice of poet faced with two different lines of poetic development.
“Birches” is a symbolic affirmation of a finely balanced attitude between pragmatic acceptance of life as it is on earth and on aspiration towards something higher through unattainable.
“I’d like to get away from earth a while
And then come back to it and begin over.”
So these lines represent a mode of consciously balancing diverging forces of affirmation and negation.
“Stopping By Woods” is a symbolic statement of the conflict which everyone has felt 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 have a strange 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 on the snowy evening”, Frost has created a new kind of symbolism out of out-dated conventional pastoralism. As 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.”
In “After Apple-Picking”, the concrete experience of apple-picking is communicated firmly and realistically, but the poem invites a metaphorical and symbolic extension. The task of apple-picking is any task; it is like itself. The drowsiness which the speaker feels after completion of task is associated with the cycle of seasons. Death might be considered to be something eminently natural, a sense of fulfillment with a great deal of honest weariness and a sense of something well-done, even though a few apples have remained unpicked:
“For I have too much
Of apple-picking; I am overtired
Profundity, Lucidity and subtlety in Robert Frost’s Poetry
There is subtlety 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 do violence to the ultimate understanding which comes only after we have been familiar with those poems for years.
In actual fact, certain basic 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——some perception of Nature, some comment about bent birches, deep woods filling up with snow. If there had been nothing in Frost below the surface meaning, he would surely have been regarded as a simple poet with a gift for versification. “Robert Frost may be called a stylist of the colloquial”.
Although his poems are often subtle and complex, their surface simplicity and lucidity attract many reads and serve as an 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 his poetic achievements. His poems chart his own inner world. Although he is gazing constantly at the external world, he is also very much an inward poet.
Robert Frost As A Serious Artist Whose Poetry Overflows Naturally Effortlessly 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 or probes deeply into the source of his poetic gift. So we may say 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.”
Robert Frost’s verse is formed; even at times, stately; its movements are often easily anticipated. Yet, despite this, his technique is so flexible, his handling of language and cadence so careful and delicate 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 processes of thought and speculation.
Robert Frost As The Poet Of Loneliness And Isolation (Death & Despair)
One of the most striking themes of Robert Frost in some of his poems of negation is man’s isolation in the universe or man’s sense of alienation from his environment. As Randi Jarrel concludes, “The grimness and awfulness and untouchable sadness of things, both in the world and in the self, have justice done to them in the poems.”
Many of his poems are about the sense of isolation, the feeling of loneliness which regards not as a peculiarly American dilemma but as a universal situation. A circumstance in Frost’s personal life too contributed to the theme of isolation or alienation in Frost’s poetry. For many years Frost’s sister, Jeanie had been showing signs of mental unbalance. By degrees she became totally alienated from the world. She was unable to accept the coarseness and brutality of existence; in particular she found the facts of birth, love, and death revolting. Jeanie’s ideal world could never be reconciled with the actual world of daily life, nor would she accept the investable.
Frost’s sadness in being unable to dissuade his sister from this 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 Jeannie 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’s 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, teasing 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 worst, insists on having the last word; “Good Fences make good neighbors.”
The husband and wife of Home Burial cannot share the grief which more than anything in their experience, should make them one in feeling; they irritate a raw spot with every syllable they utter and thus unfit themselves for any return to a normal existence.
In “The Death of Hired Man”, Marry and Warren achieve understanding and sympathy for the innocent Silas only at the moment of his solitary death.
An Old Man’s Winter Night shows an old man wandering alone in an empty house on a winter night. The man finally goes to sleep beside the store. The poem effectively captures the loneliness and patterns of old age and present a profound opposition of life against death.
“One Aged Man—-One Man—Can’t Keep A House,
A Farm, A Countryside, Or If He Can,
It’s Thus He Does It Of A Winter Night.”
In Bereft, the indifference or hostility of Nature aggravates the poet’s feeling of isolation. A scene symbolic of intense sorrow in this poem serves to express Frost’s view that man can never find a home in Nature and yet can’t live outside of it, although man can assert the reality of his spirit and thus exist independently of the physical world in the act of looking squarely at the facts of Nature.
“Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.”
Some critic remarks about Bereft, “It portrays a bleak realization of absolute loneliness, a sudden despairing sense of loss.”
In this poem, there is absolutely no relief from the aloneness which is depicted by Frost. The poem moves in part on the same lines as Desert Places from a scene of threatening images and desolation to still greater loneliness. Loneliness could not have been expressed more simply more emphatically, and more pathetically than the above concluding lines. The feeling of isolation in this poem lends poignancy to the scene while indifference or hostility of Nature aggravates the feeling of isolation. The last line is not a cry of faith but an agonized sense of absolute bereavement. The emotional emphasis in this line is on “No one.” The poem creates dramatically a sense of loneliness and terror unusual in the lyric mode.
Psychological Analyst And His Character-Portrayal
Some of the poems of Robert Frost make a psycho-analytical approach to the characters they depict. This concern with psycho-analysis 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.
There is a decrepit Silas, in The Death of Hired Man, clinging through irresponsibility and decline to his need for self-respect. Putting this idea in very apt words, Lynen says, “His self-respect can exist only as a charitable fiction, his life is, in the truest sense, ended.”
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 Robert Frost is the kind of denouement when the worldly fact achieves its full metaphysical significance.
Robert Frost confined the scope of his poetry to New England, his work widened in content and technique from volume to volume. He has shown a great capacity for growth. Each volume discloses a particular facet of his genius, some new attitude or tone or approaches. As Randal Jarrell says, “Frost’s virtues are extraordinary. No other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes came out of knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mystery, the rhythms of actual speech.”
In Home Burial and The Death of Hired Man, the scenes and dialogues, characters with complete narrative skill are as shown as we see a stage-play.
Fact and Fancy in Robert Frost’s Poetry
Fact and fancy are beautifully mingled in the lyrics of Robert Frost. Nothing escapes his observation, and nothing prevents him from speculating upon what he observes. In Stopping By Woods, Robert Frost mixes up the fact and fancy, feeling of enjoying beautiful scenes of woods, escaping from reality, engrossed in such lovely scenes but at the same time, realization of demands and responsibilities of practical and real life which prevents him to entertain himself with these captivating scenes, away from reality.
“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.”
Robert Frost As A Realist, Honest, Sober And Fantastic Artist
If we define a realist as one who really knows what he is talking about, then Robert Frost is certainly a realist. No American writer knows his subjects, people and places, so thoroughly as Frost does. But his realism has a peculiar quality. It doest not insist on a catalogue of mere trifles. It doesn’t believe in a pilling up of bold or brutal details. Frost once said:
“There are two types of realists. There is the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato. And there is one who is satisfied with the potato bruised clean. I am inclined to be the second kind to me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.”
Robert Frost deals his poetic talent very seriously and honestly. As Randal Jarrell says, “Frost’s seriousness, and honesty, the bare sorrow with which sometimes, things are accepted as they are, neither exaggerated not explained away; the many real thoughts and real emotions—-all this in conjunction with so much subtlety and exactness, such classical understatement and restraint, makes the reader feel that he is not in a book but in a world, and a world that has in common with his own some of the things that are most important in both.”
Robert Frost’s Conversational and colloquial Style
Robert Frost shows a unique mastery of conversational as well as colloquial style. His word-magic is generally of quiet, sober, bewitching sort. He writes homely colloquies such as Death of The Hired Man and Home Burial etc. He employs rhythms of actual speech, sometimes with absolute mastery. His blank verse particularly has a movement which is characteristic of him. His diction is simple and colloquial, whether the person speaking is the former who sees no reason for mending the wall, wife in the Home Burial.
Robert Frost may be called “a stylist of colloquial,” we may say, in the language he has sought to catch what he has called the “tones of speech,” but even more successfully than Wordsworth he has pruned the language really used by men, to achieve a propriety that spontaneous speech cannot attain. Using familiar tones and topics and employing technical subtleties and symbols, he evokes a fresh contemplation of simple truths. A man of letters congratulated Robert Frost on breaking away from “stilted pseudo—literary language” and daring to write in “the natural speech of New England.” Some other critic says, “This is a poetry that never pretends. It is the poetry of good conversation; it is a language of things as well as thoughts.”
Robert Frost As A Poet Of Nature (Not Nature Mystic)
Nature is a dominant subject in the poetry of Robert Frost but he is not a nature-poet in the tradition of Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy. Robert Frost’s best poetry is concerned with the drama of man in Nature whereas Wordsworth is the generally best when emotionally displaying the panorama of the natural world. Robert Frost himself said in 1952, “I guess I’m not a Nature poet. I have only written two poems without a human-being in them.”
In the epitaph that Robert Frost proposed for himself, he said that he had “a lover of quarrel with the world,” this lover’s quarrel is Frost’s poetic subject, and throughout his poetry there are evidences of this view of man’s existence in the natural world. His attitude towards Nature is one of armed and amicable true and mutual respect. He recognizes and insists upon the boundaries which exist between individual man and the forces of Nature.
“There is almost nothing of the mystic in Frost. He does not seek in Nature either a sense of oneness with all created things or union with God. There is nothing Platonic in his view of life, because it is a foreshadowing of something else.”
Robert Frost sees no pervading spirit in the natural impersonal and unfeeling. Though Nature watches man, she takes no account of him. Robert Frost treats Nature both as a comfort and menace. As a critic says, “Frost does not formulate a theory of Nature or of man’s relationship with Nature. However, it seems that Frost believes that man should live in harmony with Nature and not go against Nature or natural process.”
Robert Frost’s Moral Didacticism Blends With Aphorism
Robert Frost prefers the wisdom that is nourished by understanding and tolerance and observation. His value as a philosophical poet lies in the home-spur intelligence which shines through his poetry. His poems provide ample wisdom of a prudential kind which should serve as effective guidelines to out everyday conduct. Robert Frost’s poetry is characterized by aphoristic moralizing typical of the home-spur philosopher. The aphoristic lines in his poetry give to them a didactic quality.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Mending Wall)
“Home is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (Death of Hired Man)
“Earth’s right place for love
I do not know where it’s likely to go better.” (Birches)
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Robert Frost’s poems certainly carry a moral. But the moral is usually presented either as an argument running through a descriptive or sensuousness lyric, or as an ingredient of a dramatic situation. Seldom does Frost make a moral lesson as explicit and obvious as Wordsworth sometimes did. Cleanth Brooks says, “Frost’s themes are frequently stated overtly, outside the symbolical method; the poet comes downstage to philosophizes explicitly. At his best, of course, Frost does not philosophize. The anecdote is absorbed into symbol. The method of indirection operates fully the sense of realistic details, the air of casual comment, are employed to build up and intensify a serious effect.”
So Robert Frost was intensely dedicated and self-conscious artist. As Louis Untermeyer says, “a poetry which finds a response on every level, which begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
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 achieves its musical effects by traditional techniques of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic patterns. Much of Robert Frost’s reputation is based on such lyrics as Stopping By Woods and The Road Not Taken. Frost not only extended the subject-matter of lyric-poetry but also brought extraordinary sophistication and originality to it. Frost cared much for the sound or tune of thing in a poem was the sound of “the talking voice.”
Integration or Fusion in Robert Frost’s Poetry
According to Robert Frost, the heterogeneous elements in the poetry somehow blend in a signle autonomous unit. The problem of the poet is to achieve this integration, or this fusion. In the accomplishment of this task lies the mystery, wonder, the magic of the poetry. According to Frost, variety in poetry is more closely allied to many sidedness of content than to many sidedness of form, difficult as it may be to disentangle the one from the other in a poem. Robert Frost’s own poetry is, completely reconciled that they are happily united so as to defy any effort at separating them.
Robert Frost As A Modern Poet Or Experimentalist
Robert Frost’s poetry is abound with all ingredient of modernity because he continually proceeds his experiments in his laboratories to devise new technique or form of poetry. His lyricism, symbolism, realism, colloquialism, character-portrayal with narrative skill and dramatic touch, psychological analysis, naturalism, moral didacticism, sense of duality (union of form and content) lucidity, profundity, subtlety, dealing with subject or man’s social dilemma (painful sense and uncertainty), all these ingredients (features of his poetry are sufficient evidence of his modernity or experimentalism.
Self-revelation in Robert Frost’s Poetry
Robert Frost like all true poets reveals himself in everything he writes. As Ezra Pound says, “One reads the book for the tone which is homely and pleasing, never doubting that it comes direct from his own experience.”
Metaphysical Elements In Robert 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 to unseen. As in all great metaphysical poetry, the tension increases between the simple feet and the mystery which surrounds it, until the total meaning flashes in the final morals.
Irony In Robert Frost’s Poetry
“At its best, Frost’s irony is the sharpest of poetic weapons; at its worst, it is the forgivable pun of a wise old duffer.”
Two Ways Of Looking At Robert Frost
According to Randel Jarrell, Robert Frost may be looked at in two ways. There is the Frost that everybody knows; and there is the Frost no one even talks about. The Frost that everybody knows is the poet who has written good puns that ordinary readers understand without any trouble and that they like. This easy side of Robert Frost is most attractive to academic readers. At the same time, side of Frost is responsible for his being neglected or depreciated by intellectuals.
Robert Frost As Philosophical Poet
There is no doubt that Robert Frost has written a large number of poems which are essentially philosophical. By philosophical poetry, of course, we mean the poetry that raises the fundamental questions about life and death and man’s destiny in this universe. Whether philosophical poetry also gives answers to such questions, and whether the answers of given are satisfactorily, is a different consideration altogether. Robert Frost does certainly raise philosophical questions, though his answers are vague and ambiguous.
In other words, it is impossible to solve the mystery of the universe in which we live. Nevertheless, an effort can be made to construct some kind of system out of the cosmological implications of Robert Frost’s work. Robert Frost seems to believe that the universe includes three orders of being—man, Nature and God. These three orders are almost but no quite discontinuous, and their common element is a tendency to express themselves in orderly configurations. Man builds walls, Nature establishes zones and seasons. God constructs a cosmos. Thus in the broadest sense, man has both divine and natural sanction for his effort to find or invest patterns and meanings; but only in the broadest sense. It is not only clear that either Nature or God is concerned with man’s designs, and that there is any moral expressiveness other than those men makes for himself.
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