Tradition And Invention In Robert Frost's Poetry

No one denies the fact that Robert Frost is one of the most talented poets of our time. However, his poetic and political conservatism caused him to lose favor with some literary critics and the uniqueness of"old ways to be new"in his poetry is not fully and widely recognized by the whole critical world. Thus his fame and the value of his verse become controversial and even underestimated. Though living in an era when literary works are often branded with"city"and"industrialism"and the various"new poetry movement", Frost makes an effort to stay away from the main current and forms his own particular poetic features based on the previous literary traditions. This thesis intends to make a study of tradition and invention in Frost's view on nature, on man, and on poetic techniques of writing.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter explores tradition and invention in Frost's view on nature. Though Frost's poetry is created in the modern period of industrialism, he takes a quite different angle to observe the world, unlike most of his contemporary poets and away from the main current of poetry in his time. He prefers small farming communities to large industrial cities, and like Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau, he regards nature as a real image of the whole world of circumstances within which man finds himself. Many pastoral themes of Frost take their references mainly to the English Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Though they help Frost shape his psyche, a typical Frost poem actually plays against his predecessors'poems. Through many natural scenic images in these poems, Frost both describes the pastoral nature of New England as a precarious, inhospitable, and unknowable even threatening universe in which man exists, and shows us a picture of tragedy in natural scene and implies the doomed failure of man in such a modern"terrifying universe". Thus the kinship and differences between the traditional view and Frost's view on nature are analyzed and compared.The second chapter is devoted to a study of tradition and invention in Frost's view on man. Unlike the Georgian's escape to a sentimental rusticity, Frost takes the rural life of New England as a fresh approach to reality. Frost, with much personal tragic experience and influenced by Hardyesque view of man's suffering and defeat and sometimes by Hawthorne's emphasis on the psychological description, uses the traditional themes plus his characteristic New England local color to convey the basic conflicts in the modern society and make his meditation on man's fate. His narrative poems have gained even more enduring accomplishment just because of his penetrating observations on human nature and a strong regional sense. Frost writes of common folk in common speech and is widely praised for his striking portrait of New England life and wonderfully honest representation of man's isolation and fractured human relationships. The theme of man's isolation generally reflects the feeling of loneliness displayed in the relationship between an isolated man and nature, between man and man, man and society, even within man himself. Besides, Frost makes a penetrating insight into the difficulties of communication between man and man. Frost is eagerly aware that barriers in mutual understanding must be removed. While he also insists over and over again that as a matter of fact no program will ever resolve the basic conflicts in human life.The third chapter is an examination of tradition and invention in Frost's techniques of writing. The first to be examined is how Frost develops his unique modernity by using colloquialism and blank verse, by means of which his poetry enjoys a particular vigor. And the novelty of Frost's blank-verse narratives should be correctly recognized with their dialogue that combined convincing conversational idiom with traditional meters. As Robert Faggen states:"Frost, the greatest innovator in blank verse after Milton and Browning, cultivated an ingeniously sophisticated use of colloquial speech, giving new life to the ancient tradition of pastoral poetry."Then this chapter examines how Frost develops his theory of metaphor in a peculiar manner which displays his favorite poetic theory of"the pleasure of ulteriority"and"a clarification of life,"and it is followed by a relatively detailed study of Frost's poems in which this development demands challenging reading and contemplative devotion. Lastly, this chapter makes a study of Frost's"sound of sense"—his most effective"old-fashioned way to be new". Frost visualizes and vivifies the poems by insisting that"The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence."It is the"vital sentence"as opposed to the"grammatical"one. Though not a new thing, this effort still enjoys its peculiar significance and has been regarded as his most significant contribution to modern poetry's metrical form.The Conclusion makes an over-all assessment of Frost's poetry, drawing the conclusion that by standing on the shoulders of many great literary predecessors, Frost unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life's ambition: to write"a few poems it will be hard to get rid of". Moreover, his distinctive contribution in the development of English poetry is significant not only to the contemporary literature but also to the study of later poets.