On The Family Ethics Of The Poetry Of Robert Frost

The poetry of Robert Frost has as its background and raw material nature and farm life in New England, which explains why he tends to be categorized as nature poet or pastoral poet. This categorization is obviously oversimplified, leading to misunderstanding and neglecting his poetic world and the complexity of his poetic art. In addition, it helps readers and students alike overlook the depth and width in which the poet explored into the nature of human life, including family images and family ethics in his poetry. This paper researches into this aspect in the following three chapters.The first chapter deals with the ethic relations between children and parents. One of the patterns in Frostian family poetry is the absent children and couples in conflict. Frost intends to emphasize the importance of children to couples and families. In another group of children poetry, Frost concerns the problem of children itself, especially one in modern industrial civilization and modern families. The third group relates to the ethical duty of parents on the growth of children.The second chapter devotes to marital ethics in Frost's poetry. In the first group of poems, Frost tempts to appeal for conventional marital ethics by forgrounding the sufferings of those men or women violating sexual ethics. Poems in the second group present couples in seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of emotion and reason, and in sex power competition. To them, houses have become a barrier that they fail to break through, while couples in the third group, though in conflicts too, enjoy the hope of leading harmonious marital life through mutual compromise, usually via an Other.The third chapter covers the ethic relation of family and society. On the basis of a brief combing of the geographical space of house and its metaphorical meaning in Frostian poetry, the paper holds that Frost attaches great importance to the problem of neighborly ethic relation and the obligation of family to society.