Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Frost, Robert (Vol. 13) - Randolph Perazzini

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RANDOLPH PERAZZINI

Robert Frost was a man of many voices, the most elusive of which may be the lyric "I" of the New England poet-farmer. Believing that "the colloquial is the root of every good poem," and wanting as a corollary to bespeak American individualism and daring, he strove to be accessible without compromising his integrity as a serious, American poet. To do so he had to remain recalcitrantly local: "You can't be universal without being provincial, can you? It's like trying to embrace the wind," he said in a 1916 interview. Literally, of course, his locality is New England; figuratively, it is poetry's traditional themes—love, sorrow, death, nature, aloneness, art—and its traditional forms. It was a daring gamble to approach so near the mediocre and conventional, using them as a spacecraft uses gravitational fields to sling his poems at the last moment into striking newness that reveals what we have always known without seeing. A daring gamble, yes,...

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1. Introduction
2. Amy Lowell
3. Mark Van Doren
4. Louis Untermeyer
5. John Ciardi
6. Lawrence Thompson
7. Richard Eberhart
8. Randolph Perazzini
9. Robert B. Thompson
10. Laurence Goldstein
11. Copyright