Contemporary Literary Criticism


Frost, Robert (Vol. 1) | Frost, Robert 1874–1963

Frost, Robert 1874–1963

Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Frost celebrated especially the rural aspects of New England.

Besides the Frost that everybody knows there is one whom no one even talks about. Everybody knows what the regular Frost is: the one living poet who has written good poems that ordinary readers like without any trouble and understand without any trouble: the conservative editorialist and self-made apothegm-joiner, full of dry wisdom and free, complacent, Yankee enterprise…. It is this "easy" side of Frost that is most attractive to academic readers, who are eager to canonize any modern poet who condemns in example the modern poetry which they condemn in precept; and it is this side that has helped to get him neglected or depreciated by intellectuals—the reader of Eliot or Auden usually dismisses Frost as something inconsequentially good that he knew about long ago. Ordinary readers think Frost the greatest...

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