| Long considered out of step with Modernism, Robert Frost is now frequently seen as a precursor of poststructuralism, his poems often being praised for their "play," for the way they "undermine their surface wisdom." This study cautions that such praise might become facile and thus hide from us the implications of Frost's playfulness. Using Kenneth Burke's description of poems as "rituals of rebirth," it historicizes Frost's play.;Once we have historicized the origins and development of Frost's play, we can identify those moments when play masks a game that is completely in earnest. The last two chapters use Burke's notion of being "driven into a corner" to explain how such moments arise. They show how Frost at times plays with traditional gender categories, with notions that truth is immutable and unchanging, and with the belief that the United States has a manifest and racial destiny to become an empire. Finally, through a careful examination of Frost's prosody, of the development of his essays in the 1930s and 40s, and of his trips abroad in the 1950s on behalf of the State Department, these chapters also demonstrate that some of his most revered acts of play frequently reinforce the traditions he otherwise appears to reject.;The study concludes by considering the question of inspiration. Burke echoes Wordsworth's concern that knowledge not be bought at the price of power when he asks for "comic correctives" to the act of criticism. Employing Mary Jacobus and Harold Bloom, the epilogue attempts to return the study to the inspiring ground of poetry itself.;The first two chapters examine the origins of this playfulness in the intellectual struggles of Frost's adolescence and its resolution in his poetry. Frost's mother taught him an idealistic faith based on Emerson that was first challenged by Frost's adolescent attraction to Poe, Darwin, and Shelley and was then resolved philosophically by his reading of William James. The poetic resolution occurred fifteen years later, in what John Evangelist Walsh calls Frost's "great period." In 1912 and 1913, Frost wrote many of his most famous poems, poems that record a ritual of rebirth. |
