New England character
Background: Different student audiences warrant two quite different approaches to Frost. 1. ) Frost’s poetry might be approached by way of our sense of what was once
called the “New England character”; after all, the poet scrupulously developed a professional identity largely based on New England cultural myths. Even if most have
never been to New England, they likely have a strong sense of the region’s past and present associations: some of them deep-seated (Puritan origins; staunch Calvinism;
English and later Irish and Italian working-class enclaves), others seemingly more superficial (cranberry harvests; crab cakes; fall foliage; maple syrup). Frost
helped to shape our culture’s perceptions of New England, in particular its rural landscape and population, at a time when the people and places he describes so
memorably were feeling the effects of rapid modernization. And 2.) a more advanced approach: Frost’s poetry might be approached by way of its influence in the academy
and in the wider culture. The signposts of the Frostian aesthetic — a regionally inflected cultural nationalism and a precise formalism — curried much more favor among
a general readership and elicited much more attention among academic critics during the early and mid-twentieth century than they do today. Significantly, Frost’s
place in American literary history requires a many-faceted approach to individual poems. It always helps to ask, “What would recommend this poem to a general audience?
Why might professional critics like (or dislike) this poem?”
Although experimental personae are more closely identified with self-consciously theoretical modernists (especially Ezra Pound), no discussion of Frost is complete
without a consideration of his diverse personae. Even when Frost seems to be speaking as “Robert Frost, American poet” — as in “Design” and “The Gift Outright” — he
still manages to modulate the tone and to preclude any clear autobiographical connections. When the lyric voice takes the shape of pensive New England wanderer — as in
“After Apple-Picking,” “The Wood-Pile,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — the poems often tease the reader by interweaving folksy certainty and cosmopolitan
doubt. And Frost is most obviously experimental with personae in dramatic poems with fully formed characters — as in “Home Burial.”
Frost’s memorable characters and his homespun lyric voices are considered synonymous with New England regional identity. For better or for worse, the idea of a New
England character (however steeped in myth and tourist-industry marketing) is fast fading into the recesses of American cultural history. (Stereotypical New Englanders
rarely even find their way onto television and film these days.) Nevertheless, the natural environment of New England, recorded in Frost’s many landscape poems, still
plays an important role in the American cultural imagination. More than just document the presence of trees and snow, however, Frost ascribes meaning to the landscape
in a manner anticipated by the New England transcendentalists and the colonial Puritans.
Many who encountered Frost at an earlier point in their lives are often startled on more careful consideration to discover how wickedly dark Frost’s poetry can be.
Poems such as “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial” reveal as much about human depravity by what they don’t say as by what they do.from the book The Norton Anthology
American Literature, author Robert Frost (1874-1963) volume D
these is the question to answer:
Robert Frost’s poignant poem ”The Road Not Taken” provides the metaphor for examining choices in an information economy. Explain….What the heck does that mean?
Remember, Modernism is a commentary on the world. etc…and it usually not very positive….
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