A Study On Robert Frost’s Poetry From Cognitive Perspectives

Robert Frost(1874-1963) is one of the most famous American poets in the 20 th century. He concentrated on writing poems decades of his life and published nine collections. His poem is famous for “the deceptive simple” and his poems are highly generalized as “begin in delight and end in wisdom”, and on account of that his poems were described as “seemingly simple, complicated indeed” by Joseph Brodsky, a famous poet and critic. Therefore, after carefully intensive research and analysis on his simple-complex features, the thesis attempts to explain the role metaphor plays in the comprehension and analyzes the cognitive model as well as the themes under the model of Robert Frost’s poems.Poetry and metaphor has a close connection, for different kinds of metaphors are existed in nearly all the poems. Most researchers and readers consider those metaphors as the elements of the poetry because they are products of the poet’s thinking and creativity. Furthermore, metaphor using makes a poem more beautiful and expresses deeper thoughts of the poet, which decides that metaphor is not only a linguistic device. Besides, according to Briggs and Richard’s record: “Robert Frost once took the position that the most important and chief element in poetry is metaphor, which means talking about one thing by other things”①(Briggs& Richard, 1974).As Robert Frost said, a poem is a metaphor. The way poets think is the way we think for in the cognitive linguistics, “metaphor is a way of thinking”②(Lakoff and Johnson,1980) instead of a figure of Speech, and metaphor in the poem is a metaphorical way of thinking of the poet. Metaphorical thinking also helps the readers understand the poetry better and deeper. To explain metaphor, conceptual blending theory is used in the thesis.In the thesis, three cognitive theories are used to explain his poems. They are, Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory(CMT), Lakoff and Turner’s poetic metaphor and Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory. Lakoff and Turner completely integrated poetic metaphor into the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor in More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. This thesis, suggests that CMT can make an easy and convenient explanation towards conventional metaphor interpretation, while conceptual integration theory(CIT) can give a better interpretation in terms of complicated metaphors.After reading and analyzing the collection poems of Robert Frost, the thesis is expected to draw the following conclusions.Firstly, SOCIETY IS NATURE is the cognitive model of Robert Frost’s poetry. Under the cognitive model, there are a series of sub-divisions and they are all analyzed in Chapter 4.Secondly, under the direction of the above cognitive model, the themes of Robert Frost’s poetry are analyzed and they are: the contradictory relationship between human and nature; the emotion and thoughts of the tiny figures; the philosophy of Death –Life theme.Thirdly, it is proved that the cognitive mechanism of CMT and CIT is an efficient and powerful tool which can make help in the meaning and theme construction of poetry and the interpretation of poetry.Above all, a conclusion is drawn that analyzing and interpreting poetry from the cognitive perspectives broadens the horizon of understanding poetry.