| This dissertation examines Frost's early poems in order to characterize the voice they invoke. I propose that the voice of the poems in Frost's first three volumes (A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval) is reasonably consistent even across a wide variety of themes and subject matter. Part of the way the poet's voice gains individuality is through its treatment of its subjects, of course, and so, after a discussion of prosody and manner, in which I remain confined to the early works, I extend the study to include poems from throughout Frost's career, grouping poems according the theme and examining them from recurrent attitudes. Three themes which arise over and over are the relationship between self and nature, the relationship between self and society, and the effect of romantic love on the sense of individuality. I consider each group of poems separately, but what emerges, finally, is an over-arching theme, a stance toward the world, of which the issues of nature, society, and love are only special cases. I propose that Robert Frost found articulated in the philosophy of William James the same attitude that he, Frost, struggled to put into poetic form: we come to know ourselves by the act of exertion against opposition, and this knowledge is gained only at the risk of being overwhelmed by superior force. The goal is to engage in a continuing process of self-definition within the constraints of the outer world. For Frost, poetry is a way of constantly rediscovering the effective range of the human will, the area between chance and necessity in which we live most fully as individuals. |
