Robert Fost: Poetic Qualities

With the publication of “A Boy’s Will” (1913) and “North to Boston” (1914) Frost became the first American poet to be widely read.

Frost has been regarded as a “regional poet”. His region was New England of two best states in U.S.A. He never felt the slightest desire to include all America within the scope of his poetry. His regionalism resembles from Emily Dickinson’s. The New England provides him with the stories, attitudes, characters, which are appropriate to his needs. He falls in love with the New England tradition and it gives him strength. His work seems to capture the vanished joys of apple picking, hay-making, the sleep of an old man alone in an old farmhouse, the cleaning of the pasture spring. No American writer knows the subjects, people and places as thoroughly as Frost does. Frost is certainly a realist. He never says too much. In stories, he uses suggestion and understatement.

Frost is chiefly lyrical. The poems are a spontaneous expression of the youthful heart. Frost shows emotion, imagery and song. As regards imagery, they are full of beauties of the darkness of late autumn, still depths of winter, and intensity of the swift summer. He has written lyrics light-hearted and humorous and philosophical. Often the two extremes are combines. He has written a few love lyrics too.

The form employed by Frost is dramatic. But in some of his most successful pieces he has subordinated both drama and character to straightforward poetic narrative. In “The Code” a farm hand tells how he killed the employer by burying him under a load of hay violating an unwritten law of the fields because of made some trivial sign on his work. Here Frost has sketched out, half-humorously a story showing peculiar local customs, the odd expressions of personal pride which develop in a remote rural community. In the “Witch of Coos” a humorously gruesome story of violence, brooding and hallucination appears what is probably the most unusual ghost in American literature. At once realistic and fantastic, cynically coarse and delicately beautiful, “Paul’s Wife” is an amazingly successful fusion of the most disparate qualities.



Frost showed a philosophical bent of mind from the very beginning. He does not have any philosophical system or set of beliefs. He inclines to the inquiring manner. Often he expresses himself in a humorous or satirical vein and shows an epigrammatic gift.

Sometimes we have a blend of the familiar essays and the parable in Frost’s philosophical poems with illustrative anecdotes. “Mending Walls” is a humorous portrayal through rural anecdote of the liberal, inquiring man confronted with the man of inertia. Then there are two poems of a different kind. “A Masque of Reason” and “A Masque of Mercy”, in which the poet undertakes, if not Milton’s task of justifying God’s ways to men at least the more modest task of speculating about them.

Many of Frost’s poems are capable of a symbolic interpretation. The surface meaning of “Mending Wall” is ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ but symbolically the poem states the serious problem of our times. Should national boundaries be made stronger for our protection or should they be removed since they restrict our progress towards international brotherhood? “The Mountain” symbolizes the un-inquisitive, the unadventurous and the un-ambitious spirit. “The Road Not Taken” symbolically deals with the choice problem.

Frost is not a Nature poet in the tradition of Wordsworth. He insists upon the boundaries between man and the forces of Nature. He sees no pervading spirit in the natural world and regards it as impersonal and unfeeling. He treats nature both as comfort and menace.

Frost shows a strong disinclination towards city life. He has written no poems on friendship. He has written love poems, but misunderstanding is a constant theme in them. His poetry has curious anti-social quality. Almost every poem in “North of Boston” deals with the theme of alienation. “Desert Places” describes a similar mood and situation. Many of his poems are about the sense and the feeling of loneliness not a peculiarly American dilemma but as a universal situation. Sometimes he approaches this problem in an optimistic manner as in “Our Hold on the Planet”.

A critic has listed the typical qualities of Frost’s poetry like Frost’s tenderness, sadness and humour; his seriousness and honesty; his sorrowful acceptance of things as they are without exaggeration or explanation; his many poems with real people, real speech, real thoughts and real emotions; subtlety and exactness and a classical under-statement and restraint.


In conclusion it may be pointed out that Frost has been described as a symbolist, a spiritual drifter, a home-spun philosopher, a lyricist, a moralist, a preacher and a farmer who writes verse.

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Major Themes of Robert Frost

Frost’s poems deal with man in relation with the universe. Man’s environment as seen by frost is quite indifferent to man, neither hostile nor benevolent. Man is alone and frail as compared to the vastness of the universe. Such a view of “man on earth confronting the total universe” is inevitably linked with certain themes in frost’s poetry.

One of the most striking themes in Frost’s poetry is man’s isolation from his universe or alienation from his environment. Frost writes in “Desert Places”, “The loneliness includes me unawares”. Man is essentially alone, as is borne out in frost’s poetry. Frost is not so much concerned with depicting the cultural ethos of New England people as with presenting them “caught up in a struggle with the elementary problem of existence”. The New England of Frost reflects his consciousness of “an agrarian society isolated within an urbanized world”. Man is alone in the countryside or in the city in “Acquainted with the Night”.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
---------------------------------------------------
But not to call me back or say good-by;
In “Home Burial”, the lady suffers from a terrible sense of self-alienation, as well as alienation from her surroundings. And, more than the physical loneliness, man suffers from the loneliness within.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
A concern with barrier is the predominant theme in Frost’s poetry. Man is always erecting and trying to bring down barriers-- between man and environment, between man and man. To Frost, these barriers seem favorable to mutual understanding and respect. Frost insists on recognizing these barriers instead of trying to tear them down as in the modern trend. And he even builds them wherever necessary.

Practically all of Frost’s poems depict the theme of human limitation. The universe seems chaotic and horrific because man’s limited faculties cannot comprehend its meaning. Walls, physical and real, mental and invisible, separate man from Nature. “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” shows man’s limitation concerning the mysterious universe. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” conveys the sense of an impenetrable and indefinite universe. Frost’s human beings are aware of the gap between the ideal and the actual. The apple-picker had set out on his work with great hopes, but faces disillusionment.
For I have too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
In some poems, however, Frost does indicate that man can exceed his limitations in his thought as in “Sand Dunes”.

Theme of extinction or death also runs through the major themes of Frost. In many a poem he writes of “sleep” which is associated with death. “Fire and Ice” is a noteworthy poem on destruction by excess of desire or hatred. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “After Apple Picking”, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”, all these poems have a reference to death. “Directive” is a poem in which three of Frost’s most obsessive themes isolation, extinction and the final limitations of man are blended. Each life is shown to be pathetic because it wears away into death. The poem dismays but it also consoles.

In most of Frost’s poems, the speaker undergoes a process of self-discovery. The wood-chopper of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” realizes by the end of the poem that he chops wood for love of work only but love and need should not be separated.

Theme of affirmation is also found in some of his poems. Frost ultimately presents the need for man to make the most of his situation. Aware of man’s limitations, he yet desires man to explore and seek knowledge and truth. Man should learn to accept things and his limitations cheerfully. He suggests stoical will and effort in the face of adversity as in “West Running Brook”. In the face of the mystery and riddle of life there is necessity for determined human performance.
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I Sleep
And miles to go before I Sleep
Theme of love is central to Frost’s poems. If there is any force that can help man meet the challenges of the universe, it is love. In several of Frost’s poems, the significance of love between man and woman, or friendly love is brought out. It is when love breaks down or fades off that life becomes unbearable especially for the women in Frost’s poetry.

The major themes as discussed above are expressed through various devices. The symbolic significance invested in certain recurring objects like the stars, the snow, the woods serve to bring home to the reader all the more vividly the position of Man in the Universe.

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Robert Frost: A Modern Poet

In spite of the Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the awareness of the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science and Technology.


Critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. They do not treat such characteristically modern subjects as ‘the boredom implicit in sensuality’, ‘the consciousness of neuroses’ and ‘the feeling of damnation’. Cleanth Brooks says:

“Frost’s best poetry exhibits the structure of symbolist metaphysical poetry. Much more clearly than does of many a modern poet.”

In fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillusionment of the modern man in symbolical and metaphysical terms as much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, regrets and disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “An old Man’s Winter Night”, the old man is lonely, completely alienated from the society, likeness, the tiredness of the farmer due to over work in “Apple-Picking” and as a result of it his yielding to sleep:

For I have too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of great harvest I myself desired.
In his nature poems, Frost has also commented on the misery of the modern man which due to his going away from nature.


His metaphysical treatment of the subject in some of his poems is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:
Good fences make good neighbour
and the modern radical farmer says:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
According to J.F.Lynen the use of the pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life. He argues that it provides him with a point of view.

Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle. His pastoralism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.

Another poetic technique adopted by Frost which makes him a modern 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 neighbours 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.

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