American Poetry Studies in the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)

An Inquiry into the Major Themes Loomed Large in Robert Frost's Poems

Scholars Research Publisher , 2021

An attempt has been made to glimpse at the major themes of Robert Frost's poems. Frost is a modern American poet of the twentieth century whose poems are furnished with variegated themes. He is a poet who typifies the country's traditional cultural inheritance. He has absorbed the essence what constitutes America. He is also called the ‗voice of America' ; so to say, he has represented the faith, doubt, joys, sorrows, emotions, thoughts and ideas of the people of America. He is a poet of man whose poems deal with Man in relation with the universe crossing the border of America. Frost sees that man's environment is quite indifferent to man. To him, nature is neither absolutely benevolent to man nor hostile always. He regards nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration, nonetheless fraught with peril. Thus man is essentially alone. A barrier is made between man and his immediate environment, between man and the universe, between man and man. His work shows strong sympathy for the values of the early American society. He employs themes from the early 1900's rural life in New England. He uses the pastoral setting to examine the complex social and philosophical themes. Frost concentrates on ordinary subject matters but his emotional range is wide and deep, and his poems shift dramatically from a tone of humorous banter to the passionate expression of tragic experience. He also uses language considering his subject matters. His poetry is structured within traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes, and vernacular speeches. Daniel Hoffman regards Frost as the founder of-a new aesthetic of poetry as speeches.‖ This article aims at discussing Frost's major themes highlighting his poetic mastery.

Observation into Insight: The Poetry of Carol Frost

2008

Carol Frost has quietly established a reputation as one of the foremost lyric poets of her generation. Although her poems are typically characterized by an exquisite expression of ideas and images, her sense of phrasing extends beyond the instinct for choosing the right word or the right combination of words. In the same way that Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee could invest a rather ordinary lyric with an immediacy or a nuance that transformed it into an affecting sentiment, Frost has a sense of how to locate or break a phrase on the page in order to keep the reader engaged on many levels at once, from the visceral to the reflective.

The Afternoon (P.M.) of the Poem [criticism]

American Book Review 26 (July-August 2005): 10-11. , 2005

who is the former world chess champion and arguably its most prodigious calculating mind, recently announced that he would retire from competitive chess in order to devote his talent for strategizing to the opposition of Vladimir Putin's increasingly autocratic rule of Russia; in effect, Kasparov is exchanging game theory for politics, while importing much of the talent that makes him nearly invincible in the one field to the other. We wish him well. Although not in so large a domain, the critic Brian McHale, in his latest book, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, shifts his field of inquiry from postmodernist fiction-the subject of his two prior efforts, including the landmark treatise, Constructing Postmodernism (1992)-to the postmodernist long poem. In this case, McHale brings with him an impressive array of strategies that he has familiarly deployed with respect to the novel, but now concentrating his analysis on the difficult problem of characterizing the long form in poetry in the twentieth century. In particular, he contends that recent long forms in poetry have adopted the very same "shift in the dominant" (in structuralist terms) that he found to be present in postmodernist fiction: whereas modernist fiction had been largely preoccupied with epistemological questions or uncertainties with respect to knowledge and

ROBERT FROST'S POETRY: A STUDY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE

The poet/critic Randall Jarrell often praised Frost's poetry and wrote, "Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot, seems to me the greatest of the American poets of this century. Frost's virtues as a poet and artist are extraordinary. No other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech‖. Robert Frost loved nature. His poetry was full of emotional appearances about his personal life and behavior. In addition, his literary verses are uncomplicated and profound. He also wrote plain fictions about common people, usually inhabitants of rustic New England. Robert Frost wrote exceptional prose, applying ordinary and sincere language; his poems enclose concept of symbolism, obscure significances, sounds, rhyme, meter, metaphors and more. Robert Frost was, quite simply, one of America's leading 20 th century poets. It could be because he wrote poems about rural life drawing a distinct contrast between its innocence and peacefulness and the depression and corruption of city life. It could also be because he used traditional verse forms that were understood by one and all. It might even be that people sensed his step forward in the direction of modernizing the interplay of rhythm and meter while writing exactly how people spoke. His poetry has been called traditional, experimental, regional, universal, and even pastoral. The world of Frost's poetry is beautiful but it is also harsh and uncaring. Frost wrote that, ―Man has need of nature, but nature has no need of man‖. The poem Birches contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground temporally by a boy's swinging on them or permanently by an ice storm. But as the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child's play and natural phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge: ― I like to think some boy's been swinging them But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice – storms do‖

When Poetry and Phenomenology Collide

In recent years several scholars have wrestled with the term “poetic thought,” suggesting in various ways there is something distinctive about the nature of meaning as it occurs/unfolds through poetry. In this paper I suggest, in part following the lead of Simon Jarvis, that one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for exploring this idea lies in a consideration of poetic works through the lens of Heidegger’s early phenomenology. Specifically, I argue that one of the keys to understanding poetic thought lies in a flaw within Heidegger’s ontological divisions between substances, equipment and Dasein, as presented in Being and Time (1927). Through an analysis of three poems by Frank O'Hara, I argue poetry that examines and represents the physical world presents a problem for Heidegger when he suggests equipment in the world must necessarily “withdraw” in order for us to engage with it authentically. To address this, the term environment-at-hand is introduced to describe the relationship between artists and the surrounding environments used for their work. Poetic thought is here conceived as the point where poetry and phenomenology collide; where poetry reflects and enacts the fact that humans are inherently engaged meaning-makers. In this way poetry does not only show us new ways of looking at the world, which it surely does, but it can help us understand the nature of being itself.