Robert Frost Book Of Poems

[Cora Auch]

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In the beginning, Silas is judged by the fact that he wandered off lookingfor a little pay,"Enough at least to buy tobacco with,/So he won't have to begand be beholden." He is no longer productive, and it's unclear if he ever was,except for his ability to "build a load of hay." This is probably the Americannightmare ... judging another in terms of their work, what they can DO, theircash value.

The best part of the poem is the transition that takes place in Warren as hecomes to realize that Silas is a lot more than just a worker. He's acomplicated individual. Mary utters one of the most telling remarks int hepoem: "He don't know why is isn't quite as good/As anyone." As things move on,Warren softens (after his initial "anger," was he ever anything butsoft?) When Mary says Silas' working days are over, it is Warren whoremarks, "I'd not be in a hurry to say that." We have moved over to the bestpart of the American Dream, the community part. Americans havetraditionally had a strong sense of community, and even though there are toolate for Silas, they do provide a "home" where he died loved.

Brady, Timothy. "How does Robert Frost's poetry reflect both the American dream and nightmare?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 11 Sep. 2008, -frost/questions/how-does-robert-frost-contain-both-american-dream-28299.

In his poem, The Vanishing Red, Frost writes about the death of thelast Indian in America. Technically, the poem is a statement aboutthe white settlers who pushed the Native American off his land, and tookpossession. In history, this is known as Manifest Destiny, belief thatAmerica had to expand her borders from the Atlantic to thePacific. This was done at the expense of the Native Indians who occupiedthis territory. They were pushed, relocated or murdered off theirland.

He is said to have been the last Red man

In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed--

If you like to call such a sound a laugh.

But he gave no one else a laugher's license.

For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,

'Whose business,--if I take it on myself,

Whose business--but why talk round the barn?--

When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.'

You can't get back and see it as he saw it.

It's too long a story to go into now.

You'd have to have been there and lived it.

They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter

Of who began it between the two races." (Frost)

Sykes, Edith. "How does Robert Frost's poetry reflect both the American dream and nightmare?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 3 Aug. 2008, -frost/questions/how-does-robert-frost-contain-both-american-dream-28299.

Listening to Frost talk about politicians and politics in his way, I came to admire him for his fierce self-regard more than I would have expected to; whether cause or effect or accompanying condition, it was certainly connected with his great gift. A very old, swollen, slowly moving man, he defended every particle of existence left to him and remembered every grief with a depth of feeling for those he had lost; the subtlety and hardness of his thinking were particularly striking in the company of people always concessive, watchful, neutral, and subdued. He was from another species, where people were smarter but also not afraid to suffer. He was openly vulnerable. In the candid commentary to his large volume of selected Frost letters,1 Professor Lawrance Thompson, Frost's designated biographer, contrasts Frost's lack of confidence with his strong pride in himself as a poet. Frost gave the impression of fighting to keep everything he had won, of having to triumph over every obstacle, of wanting to call on everything within reach for his continuing education. Of course I had known about Frost's early difficulties in getting a hearing, and that it was only in England, when he was thirty-nine, that he was able to get his first book published; I knew that he relished his many academic honors all the more because of his own brief and irregular attempts at a college education. But it was startling to find Frost reciting all his early college grades and still cursing Pound for a braggart as he walked up and down the cold Amherst streets after he had had a too exciting evening reading from his poems in Johnson Chapel and could not sleep. He would recite his life over again, exactly as he does in so many letters to scholars, critics, reviewers, and collectors in Professor Thompson's book. Yet the most extraordinary thing about his verbal memories was the spell they put on him as he recited them. The transitions were as wonderful, original, and clairvoyant as they are in his best poems; even when he was shaking with fatigue and cold but would obstinately refuse to go to bed until he had talked himself out, his ideas were sinewy, shrewd, right on the button. I understood better why Frost felt related to Emerson, despite the difference in their philosophies. One of Emerson's early biographers remembers him talking in a stream of perfect sentences even when he was dying. Frost's sentences were achieved definitions, and showed an obsessive drive to clarity. One felt that they were a physical necessity.

In quarters naturally hostile to poetry that requires intellectual effort, Frost enjoyed a misleading reputation as a poet accommodating to average capacities and prejudices. Actually Frost had a bleak, if stoical, outlook; the religious faith which in private came out like the most stubborn of his loves was perhaps more a fact in Frost's complicated personal strategy for living than in his work, which in its best period did not seek to express personal beliefs, but dramatized concrete situations as new material for poetry. What makes Frost's poetry unusually interesting to the general reader is Frost's subject matter, which is characteristic experience in dramatic encounters. Frost does not write about poetry or about making the modern world safe for poetry, the usual themes of romantic and symbolist poets, for whom the poet himself is the hero. Frost writes about situations which threaten the moral balance of the passerby who has fallen into the situation. He makes poetry out of the dramatic, startling contest with the negative blackness that begins everywhere outside the hard-won human order. Frost's poetry is about the strength needed for living one's life, and it is about living in a way that differs very sharply from the stock poetry of modern life as a tragedy of disbelief, from the self-conscious ironies of literary reference that make the poet sound like Hamlet talking to Polonius.

To read Frost's best poems is to have a series of satisfactions in the intellectual, emotional, and technical conquest of difficulties. They certainly do not inspire the reader with the wonder of pure imagination that is found in Yeats; even Hardy, whom we inevitably think of when reading Frost, gives the reader a sense of the Biblical cosmos, the more-than-human significance of the creation itself, that we do not find extending out of Frost's dramatic narratives. Frost's poems are directly about struggle; the terms of the struggle are defined with satisfying honesty and exactness, even to the epistemological difficulties that man encounters in getting to know the world. One feels in reading Frost's best pieces that he has defined certain difficulties of existence exactly, and has solved them just in the nick of time, so that little is left over for man's imaginative edification. Poetry now exists as if to assure us of another world, more worthy of our imagination; and when Eliot or Stevens actually makes us see this other world, we are dazed and grateful, as if the gold diffused in the sea had solidified and were now shining in our eyes. But Frost, who said that Stevens wrote on bric-a-brac, wanted to make poetry the triumph of this world. His hand-carved poems came out without the slightest concession to elegance, and the imaginative splendor he achieved, deeply impressive but by no means meant to impress you with splendor anywhere else, lay in the idiosyncratic truth of his lines, in the depth of experience that we associate with such masterful ability to achieve transitions. Just as Frost's God did not seem to extend to the world, so that He held the balance of existence but would not influence it, so Frost's poems do not make living easier, or imaginatively more luxurious. But they are immensely satisfying, because of the voice that prevails in them.

The frost I briefly knew fought for fame, for control of his reputation, for mastery of human experience, on terms which he seemed able to impose on the younger and more passive people around him. So in this book of his letters, one hears Frost talking about his own life, advancing his career, handling the many people who were useful to him. A letter for Frost was an exercise in assertion, without the charm that the interplay of poetic narrative called out of him. Frost did not like writing letters and he did not surrender to anything when he wrote one. But the letters together make an impressive account of Frost's efforts to establish himself and to uphold himself. The severity of his struggles stuck to him in his triumph and became for him the characteristic mark of triumph.

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