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  • Frost As A Modern Poet

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    Muhammad Arif Nawaz
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    Robert Frost is considered both a traditional 19th century poet and a modern poet of the 20th century. While his poems depict rural settings and focus on pastoral elements, his poetry also incorporates elements of modernism like realism, symbolism, existentialism, and themes of social constraints and alienation. Many of Frost's poems deal with characters suffering from frustration, isolation, and helplessness that are characteristic of modern life. Through his use of symbolic and indirect expression, as well as themes of uncertainty, loss of values, and disillusionment, Frost can be seen as a modern poet who captured the essence of the modern experience.

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    Frost as a Modern Poet

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    Frost as a Modern Poet

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    Robert Frost is considered both a traditional 19th century poet and a modern poet of the 20th century. While his poems depict rural settings and focus on pastoral elements, his poetry also incorporates elements of modernism like realism, symbolism, existentialism, and themes of social constraints and alienation. Many of Frost's poems deal with characters suffering from frustration, isolation, and helplessness that are characteristic of modern life. Through his use of symbolic and indirect expression, as well as themes of uncertainty, loss of values, and disillusionment, Frost can be seen as a modern poet who captured the essence of the modern experience.

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    401 views2 pages

    Frost As A Modern Poet

    Uploaded by

    Muhammad Arif Nawaz
    Robert Frost is considered both a traditional 19th century poet and a modern poet of the 20th century. While his poems depict rural settings and focus on pastoral elements, his poetry also incorporates elements of modernism like realism, symbolism, existentialism, and themes of social constraints and alienation. Many of Frost's poems deal with characters suffering from frustration, isolation, and helplessness that are characteristic of modern life. Through his use of symbolic and indirect expression, as well as themes of uncertainty, loss of values, and disillusionment, Frost can be seen as a modern poet who captured the essence of the modern experience.

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    Frost as a Modern Poet

    Frost’s first volume of poetry was published in 1913, and his last in 1947, and he died
    in 1963. Thus, in point of time, he is the contemporary of such 20th century poets as T.S.
    Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Auden and Ezra Pound. But critics after critics have regarded Frost as a
    traditional 19th century poet, and have emphatically denied his modernity. In spite of
    pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a modern poet because his poetry
    has been endowed with all the elements of modernism, such as realism, symbolism, social
    constrains, existentialism, alienation and destruction caused by industrialization.
    As most of these characteristics are obvious in Frost’s poetry, he qualifies as a modern
    poet. However, critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet.
    Some critics think that Frost is a Pastoral poet as his poems are essentially the poems of
    pasture and plains, mountains and rivers, woodland gardens, groves and bowers, fruits ad
    flowers, seeds and birds, they do not consider such characteristics as boredom implicit in
    sensuality, the consciousness of neurosis and the feeling of damnation. There is some
    poetic technique of Frost which makes him as a modern poet.
    According to J.F. Lynen, the use of the pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does
    not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life as some critics
    think. Frost use pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern life style. His
    pastoralism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values in the modern age.
    Like T.S. Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins. As a matter of fact, Frost’s Pastoralism is an, “exploration
    upstream, past the city with its riverside factories and shipping, on against the current of time
    and change to the clear waters of the source.” It is a technique through which he not only
    achieves modernity, but also universality.
    Frost may not depict the scenery of modern life—its chimney and factories, its railways,
    and automobiles, but he certainly deals with the basic problems and the basic facts of
    modern life. The ache of modernism finds its fullest expression in his poetry. The modern
    note of frustration, loneliness, isolation and disillusionment is often struck. Most of his poems
    deal with characters who suffer from frustration, isolation and helplessness—diseases of
    modern life, which are portrayed in modern poems like The Waste Land.”
    For example, the poem The Road Not Taken depicts the confusion which prevails in
    modern life. The modern man does not know which way to go, and it is difficult for him to make
    a choice of the means he should adopt in order to come out of the present impasse. He is
    confused, and his life does not have a clear purpose. The protagonist in the poem (the poet
    himself) represents the modern man, who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice
    made, but belatedly and wistfully sighs over the attractive alternative which he rejected:

    I shall be telling this with a sigh


    Some ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less
    travelled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

    An Old Man’s Winter Night is another poem of isolation, frustration and loneliness,
    and it is an epitome of modern times. The man is not only old, but lonely and it is the winter
    night:
    A light he was to no one but himself
    Where now he sat, concerned with he knew not what,
    A quiet light, and then not even that.

    1 Compossed by M.Arif MA English-2 Govt. College Civil Lines Multan


    Frost as a Modern Poet
    Home Burial in which the husband and wife are cursing and irritating each other on the
    day when their son is dead, depicts the disharmony and disintegration of modern life, when
    each person holds a divergent view from the rest, and there is no common, basic approach to
    life, which is characteristic of the modern age. All human sympathy is gone, and it has been
    replaced by selfishness. Here the wife blames the husband for his callousness:

    I heard your rumbling voice


    Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
    But I went near to see with my own eyes.

    It is possible to read Frost’s poetry on several levels. The common man may read
    him for charming depictions of rural scenery and rural life. The erudite, on the other hand,
    may read him for the clarification and illumination which he provides. A careful reading
    reveals that Frost’s simplicity is deceptive, that his poetry has layers within layers of
    meaning. This expressiveness and richness of texture becomes possible only because
    Frost, like the great moderns, employs a metaphysical-symbolistic technique of expression.
    For example, Mending Wall is a symbolic poem in which the poet symbolizes the
    conflict between the new trend of bringing down barriers between men and nations, and the
    old view that for good neighbourly relations fences and boundaries are essential. In this way,
    the poem becomes a symbol of the modern conflict in the minds of the people. The poet
    simply portrays that conflict, and does not give his judgment on it, because in spite of his
    standing for the bringing down of barriers, he appreciates the view of his neighbor who
    insists on following the old principle of his forefathers that,

    “Good fences make good neighbors”

    The charming lyric Stopping by Woods apparently records a moving personal experience.
    Read symbolically, it expresses the conflict which everyone has felt, between the demands of
    practical life, with its obligations to others, and the poignant desire to escape into a land of
    reverie, where consciousness is dimmed and the senses are made independent of necessity.
    As Austin Warren points out, sleep, winter, and darkness in the poem symbolize death; and
    woods are a symbol for perilous enchantment. An Old Man’s Winter Night, The Woodpile,
    After Apple-picking, Birches, Neither Out For Nor in Deep, and a lot of other poems, are
    equally symbolic and significant.
    Conclusion
    In short, Frost is a modern poet in more ways than one. He may not depict the
    outward conditions and events of modern life, but the central facts of modern
    experience, the uncertainty and painful sense of loss, the disintegration and confusion of
    values, the frustration and disillusionment, are all there, and they seem more bleak and
    terrifying because they are presented in their nakedness, stripped of all their social,
    political and economic manifestations. And his mode of expression is symbolic and
    indirect. All this is the mark of a genuinely modern poetry.

    2 Compossed by M.Arif MA English-2 Govt. College Civil Lines Multan

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