FREE NOTES: ROBERT FROST: Frost's poetry both tradition and modern

Frost poetry both tradition and modern

 Question: What makes Frost’s poetry both tradition and modern?

or, Frost’s poetry reflects modern life despite its pastoral setting- substantiate.

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Answer: Robert Frost is a blend of both modern and tradition. Frost follows pastoral and romantic tradition that we see in his poems “Vergil’s “Georgics”’, “Build soil”, “Design”, “West Running Book”, “The Onset” etc. Frost’s most revealing characteristic of modernity is his use of technique. In consideration of his themes, he is a classic- traditional as well as modern. 

            Modern poetry may be said to have begun as a fresh attempt to solve the problem posed by science. Imagism, or , we can say symbolism, represents an attempt to confront the physical facts of reality in the most direct way in modern poetry. Frost’s poetry is not modern in this connection. But Frost is one who, in his own way deals with the very problem of modern people, which is the concern of the symbolists. 

            Both Frost and symbolists tend to view reality through the perspective of contrasting levels of beings. In Frost’s nature poems this technique obviously results from his desire to recognize the validity of science. Frost’s nature poetry is closely related to his pastorals. And we know, he never deals with nature as was dealt by Wordsworth; he pictures human condition with his love for nature. “To a Moth seen in Winter”  shows his characteristic conception of nature.            

           

                       “You must be made more simply wise than I

                        To know the hand  I stretch impulsively

                        Across the Gulf of well nigh everything

                        May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate.”

 

As a man of modern age, Frost writes poetry about people of distinct mood. His poetry is largely devoted to pictures of regional life. In his pastorals, Frost’s dominant motive is to reassert the value of individual perception against the fragmenting of experience resulting from modern technology. It is true that Frost’s solution to this problem involves a withdrawal from the modern city to an agrarian world. He does not  turn his back on the world of today, nor does he advocate a ‘return to the soil’.

 With the single word ‘love’, Frost has linked the fertility of the fields to sexual and spiritual procreation. The flower image may be taken by Frost from Catullus. In Catullus’s wedding –song, broken flower represents virginity. There are many aspects of Frost’s indoor schooling in Greek and Latin literature, such as the Lucretian vision of some of the poems about science , his adaptations of the techniques of Horace’s satires and epistles. 

             Frost’s main technical achievement, the invention of a new blank-verse rhythm, is hardly separable from his gift for drama and his wise insight into the human condition. Frost’s modernity is his drawing the climax with the range of variations. For example, we can cite some lines of the poem “The Death of the Hired Man”

            “Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,

            And nothing to look backward to with pride,

            And nothing to look forward to with hope,

            So now and never any different.”

 In the voice of the very different wife of ‘Home Burial’, we have another fine example to the rushes and intensities and interruption that Frost uses to carry oppositions to feeling:

‘But I understand: it is not the stones,

But the child’s mound-`

 The rough grammar and odd sentence order are in reality modern piece of artful should aimed at dramatic effect. The farmer’s definition of ‘home’ in ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ is very noteworthy:

            “Home is the place where

            When you have to go there.....”

 The another modern characteristic in Frost is his use of free couplet rhyme. A few lines in “The grindstone” will show how the free couplet rhythm increases the sense of cantankerous will- to- go in grinder and stone;

                  “Except that I remember how of old

One summer day, all day I drove it hard

And someone mounted on it rode it hard

And he an Ibetween us ground a blade.”

 Whether it is in technique or theme. Robert Frost is a true representative of modern and traditional trends. Frost follows Greeks, romantics, but makes the poems of his won. He is not a blind follower of tradition. He always thinks things in his own way. As a modern poet, his use of blank verse, free rhyme, dramatic dialogues, and fear, despair and suffering of human being attracts the readers most. 

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Amir Mohammad kabir, M.A (2007),

edukabir@gmail.com//amikabirg_08@yahoo.com// http:// www.notesbd.blogspot.com

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