Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Frost, Robert (Lee) - W. J. Keith

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W. J. KEITH

[Let us consider Frost's] relation to his material…. [There are] some poems in which no narrator is specified, and others in which the centre of attention has been 'I,' 'he,' 'they,' and even 'we.' Frost has always been conscious of the artistic possibilities of such variation, and one reason for the narrative variety clearly lies in the poet's reluctance to be identified too closely with the speaker of his poems…. The angle of narration depends not on the reflection in subject-matter of autobiographical experience but, as in poets from whom he learned his trade, on the artistic needs of individual poems.

One has only to alter the pronoun in the first line of 'The Most of It' and read,

I thought I kept the universe alone,

to begin to realize what is at stake. Although we tend to assume that the first person gives greater vividness and immediacy, and that vividness and immediacy are unquestionably...

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1. Introduction
2. T. K. Whipple
3. Harriet Monroe
4. Richard Church
5. Peter Viereck
6. Robert Penn Warren
7. John T. Ogilvie
8. James M. Cox
9. Roy Harvey Pearce
10. Robert Graves
11. Isadore Traschen
12. Elaine Barry
13. Donald J. Greiner
14. W. J. Keith
15. Copyright

1. Robert Frost