Frost Was a Modern Poet
In
spite of the Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a
modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the awareness of the
problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science and Technology.
Critics
have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a
pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and
gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. They do
not treat such characteristically modern subjects as ‘the boredom implicit in
sensuality’, ‘the consciousness of neuroses’ and ‘the feeling of damnation’. Cleanth Brooks says: Frost’s best poetry exhibits the structure of symbolic metaphysical poetry. Much more clearly than does of many a modern
poet.
In
fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and
the disillusionment of the modern man in symbolical and metaphysical terms as
much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal
with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, regrets and
disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “ After Apple-Picking” the
speaker feels the tiredness due to over work and as a result of it his yielding
to sleep:
For I have too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of great harvest I myself desired
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of great harvest I myself desired
In
his nature poems, Frost has also commented on the misery of the modern man
which due to his going away from nature. His metaphysical treatment of the
subject in some of his poems is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending
Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and
then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative
farmer says: Good
fences make good neighbor.
And
the modern radical farmer says: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
Frost
uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle.
His pastoral-ism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values
in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age
like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.
Another
poetic technique adopted by Frost which makes him a modern poet is symbolism.
“The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of
invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from
one another mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbors in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize
man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this
world.
To sum up, we can say that Frost is a modern
poet in his view of Nature and human life, as well as in his poetic technique
and style.
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