Robert Frost’s Poetics Of Metaphor

Robert Frost is obviously very philosophical.But few critics grounded the matterspirit metaphysics of Frost on his metaphoric epistemology,in which metaphor is far more than a language device,but in essence the fundamental structure of human knowledge.Such an understanding would also inspire his poetic exploration of the world through metaphor,which I term a poetics of metaphor,and echoes well with William James’ s Pragmatism and the more recent Conceptual Metaphor Theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.The first part delves into the historical backdrop of Frost’s playful,relative,provisional,experiential and optimistic solution to a loss of metaphysical meaning at the time,which was very much inspired by William James’ s pragmatic theory of truth and resonates with Lakoff and Johnson’s experiential philosophy of metaphor.Chapter two,borrowing the Cognitive Metaphor Theory,throws light on why and how Frost exploited metaphor to such an extent that it became his brand of poetics.The last chapter explains how metaphor matters in his matter-spirit uniting enterprise of poetry.As shown in many of his writings,Frost understood well the ache of this “uncertain age”,central to which are the questions of “How the world is understood” and “What is truth”,the inquiry into the relation of human subjectivity and the external environment,or matter and spirit in Frost’s terms.Although James has mentioned the cognitive importance of classification and subsumption,Frost almost spontaneously went further to assert that metaphor should be the core of human conceptual system.The Conceptual Metaphor Theory indeed confirmed that our conceptual units are experientially grounded,metaphorically structured,relatively hedged and subject to recategorization.Thus the reality we perceive is partially subjectively constructed.For Frost,this means his beliefs about self,art,human relationship,nation and the universe,are constantly evolving,and we should turn to experiences rather than fixed truth for senses of value.Such convictions about matter-spirit synthesis and metaphor saturate his prose and verse writings,especially those grand statements of his poetics like “Education by Poetry”,“The Constant Symbol”,“The Figure a Poem Makes” and “Birches”,and are also sufficiently borne out by his reason and way of pursuing the career of poetry.Metaphor the cognitive mechanism would become a metaphor for human dealings with the world for Frost,like science,religion,philosophy and poetry.Thus what it means for Frost to unite material and spirit,is for him to cope with the world as an agent,to live as a human,to deploy his four beliefs about life,in and through his metaphor,which is poetry,for only poetic illustration is open and experiential enough to indulge the metaphoric play.