The poetical qualities of Robert Frost

 

The poetical qualities of Robert Frost

A conservative as a poet:

Robert Frost was a conservative as well as an experimenter. He together with many other younger men and women of his age was ready to prove that the traditions of American formal verse still had its own vitality if need from its mannerism and conventional restrains. At first his readers thought him to be merely a poet of nature, and did not much close attention to his deceptively simple verses.

Deeper significance in his poems:

With the publication of " A Boy's will " Robert Frost became the first American to be widely read since Longfellow and Whittier. It was possible, of course to read such poems as " The tuft of flowers" as pastoral moralities expressing passing moods but there was an intensity in his comments on brotherhood and death had a deeper significance. A moment of his life involving nature and man in what to most people would be routine and meaningless act becomes in each of these poems a sharp and complete symbol of truth, the observation , its meaning and the poetic form in which it is ended.

Homely Colloquies:

To him the tone of voice was the beginning of poetry. He would use the Iambic meter because it was the  most natural one of the English language, but he would spring it and spread it to catch the "speaking tone of voice". Some how the technique of the dramatic lyric, learned mainly from Browning and already domesticated in the United States.

A skeptical Humanist:

Frost stood firm and with one more warm but still wry smile he wrote one of his major works. He was a twentieth century transcendentalist. His faith was a complete skeptical humanism. Man could safely defy an unreasonable Deity if he had first made his peace with nature. 

Two themes in His shorter Lyrics:

It is in his shorter poems that we feel closest  to Frost himself. Here he often works with two themes One is connected with man's limitedness". This limitedness lies in the fact that man lives in a world not just made for him and therefore can not be sure of absolute and final answers. The other theme is a corollary from this. If man can not be sure of absolute answers, he must do what is necessary to be done in a spirit of love.

Freedom for the poet:

In the essay called " The Figure  a Poem makes" he demands freedom for the poet . It is not political freedom that he asks for. The poet should be free to be himself.

The feelings of loneliness;

Many of his poems are about the sense of isolation, the feelings of loneliness which he regards not a peculiarly American dilemma but as a universal situation. Sometimes he approaches this problem in an optimistic manner as " Our Hold on the Planet". Frost in his poetry has done justice to " grimness and awfulness and untouchable sadness of things, both in the world ad in the self. Frost is humble enough not to want to alter tradition, radically, but also tough and original enough to to make something entirely his own out of language and a literary inheritance