How Robert Frost is a Modern poet

How Robert Frost is a Modern poet

The term “modern” has a variety of connotations. Etymologically, it refers to whatever is in fashion at the moment. In this sense, it may be taken as synonymous with recent. Then, it is also used in the Shakespearean sense to refer to what is ordinary and commonplace. It may also refer to the scientific and technological progress of civilization and to social attitudes prevalent in highly urbanized communities. In literary terminology, “modern” refers to style or attitude in recent culture as well as contemporaneity in content. It hardly needs saying that no work of art can be expected to manifest all these diverse elements all at once. 

In point of time, Frost's poetry is modern. His first volume of verses was published in 1913 and the last in 1962 just a year before his death. He is modern in the sense that he lived and worked in our own century. He is also modern in the sense that he is a contemporary of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats, all of whom, by common consent is termed, Modern poets. However, in order to determine Frost's modernity, we must look into other facts also. 

By modernity is not meant contemporaneity. A work does not become ‘modern’ merely because it has been published in the last year or two, or since the beginning of the century. “Modernity” therefore should not be judged on the basis of historical perspective. 

Work can be called modern only if it has certain characteristics such as awareness and knowledge and reflection of contemporary social, and_ scientific developments, a sensibility to contemporary phenomena like machinery, the industrial city, and neurotic behavior, the liveliness that comes from topicality, the difficulty that comes from intellectual abstruseness, blend of thought and emotion, crazing to blend all kinds of realities, a mistiness or mystic and symbolic overtures, involvement with the mind or soul of the individual preference to an individual instead of importance to society.

Originality, love of convention but a desire to break convention, paradox and antithesis, moribund attitude, etc. These are some of the features of modern literature. No one writer can catch up with all these features. If Some of them are shared by a writer, a writer becomes modern 

Stephen Spender defines modernism as “a sensibility to contemporary phenomena like machinery, the industrial city, and neurotic behavior”. According to the Times Literary Supplement, “the liveliness that comes from topicality and the difficulty that comes from intellectual abstruseness” are the hallmarks of modernity. 

Critics such as Isidor Schneider, William Van O'Connor, Granville Hicks, and Your Winters do not consider Frost a modern poet. Schneider, pointing out serious limitations in the poetry of Robert Frost, observes: “Mr. Frost is singularly out of touch with his own time. Indeed many poets who antedate him are contemporary in spirit. 

It has, indeed, been Mr. Frost's wish to keep out of his own age and his own civilization. We may, therefore, go to his poetry for diversion and relief from our time, but not for illumination. Mr. Frost does not understand our time and will make no effort to understand it.” Schneider regards Frost's volume of verses New Hampshire as “one of the poorest in the books and a sort of pudding of irrelevancies”. 

The opinion of William Van O’Connor on the modernity of Robert Frost is still more fortnight. In his opinion, Frost's evaluation as a modern poet will finally rest on whether he possesses modern sensibility or not. Although he admits that there are no clear-cut criteria on which we can surely say what is modern and what is not, still he makes it clear that Frost's poetry lacks tensions and conflict which grow out of industrialization and technological advancement. To Connor Frost is a poet of tradition. He says, “tradition serves poetry well and is necessary to it—but it would seem that as minds poets have some obligations to face the problems which give their time its character.” 

Granville Hicks begins with the assumption that Frost is a poet of understanding and originality, but “he has chosen to identify himself with a moribund tradition. Many poets, in these hundred and fifty years, have written of mountains, fields, and brooks, and of farmers at their humble task; these things have become part of our imaginative inheritance, and one must be insensitive indeed not to be conscious of the beauty in them. 

But there are other objects more frequently appearing before our eyes—factories, skyscrapers, machines. We see mechanics, hop-girls, truck drivers, more often than we do farmers, and we see the farmers not as a romantic figure but as the victim ef cruel economic forces.” But Frost cannot be termed a modern poet because he remained immune to the predicaments of mechanics, truck drivers, and hop-girls. 

Yvor Winters is also sure that Frost has his affinities with the great 19th century Romantic poets rather than with the great moderns. He analyses poems like The Bear to show that Frost admires man as an impulsive and not as a reasoning creature, and this is in marked opposition to modern thought. He says that the poem, The Bear, is “amusing on first 

reading, but it wears thin with time. Frost tells us in this poem that reasoning man is ridiculous because he appears to labor and to change his mind, and he implies that impulsive man would be a wiser and a nobler creature.” The fact, in the opinion of Winters is just the opposite, and an impulsive man is “confused, uncertain and melancholy”. 

Some others do not regard him as a modern poet because of his pastoralism and agrarian outlook. He is, moreover, not a poet of barren lands. The civilization, in which he lived and wrote, might be in a crate of progressive degradation, might be stale and sterile, dry and drab, dark and dismal, surrounded by a ‘miserable generation of enlightened men, but Frost has nothing to do with it. 

Themes of Hollow Men, Gerontion, Look Back in Anger, Age of Anxiety, or even The Waste Land are just outside his range. He is not out to lament over the ‘spiritual spilled milk’, nor does he show his wounds, his laziness, his boredom, and ennui living in this ‘dedicated work-a-day century’. It is none of his business to lower literature to “the boredom implicit in sensuality”, “the consciousness of neurosis,” the feeling of “damnation on this earth”. He is essentially a poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, seeds and birds.

Yet there are other critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Lionel Trilling, and John F. Lynen who consider Frost to be a modern poet. Cleanth Brooks says, “Frost's best poetry exhibits the structure of symbolist metaphysical poetry, much more clearly, than does of many a modern poet.” Frost portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillusionment of the modern man. 

Most of his poems deal with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, loss, and disease of modern life. For example, in The Hill Wife, he deals with the sense of isolation and fear and marital estrangement of an isolated woman. The poem is subtly suggestive and psychologically developed. And Home Burial portrays the disharmony prevailing in the modern world. In An Old Man's Winter Night, the man is lonely and old: 

A light he was to no one but himself 

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, 

A quiet light, and then not even that. 

Modern man's disillusionment, frustration, gloom, isolation, and loneliness are reflected in the following lines : 

No, from the time when one is sick to death, 

One is alone, and he dies more alone 

Friends make pretense of following to the grave, 

But before one is in it, their minds are turned 

And making the best of their way back to life 

And living people, and things they understand. 

Frost also anticipates symbolism and imagism in his poetry. In his descriptions, he is a realist like other modern writers. His love of nature is an indication that modern man has gone far away from Nature and his own nature; his salvation lies only in taking refuge in nature. People of his poems are all modern human beings. 

The Symbolist verse of Pound, Eliot, and Yeats “represents the dominant mode of modern poetry.” Considered in the light of the Symbolist technique, Frost is a modern poet. In the words of Lynn, “He is not only a poet of the twentieth century but one who, in his own way, deals with the very problem which is the concern of the Symbolism.” 

Frost is opposed to Romantic tendencies; in this respect too he is modern. Frost's pastoralism is not a barrier to his modernity. “In his pastorals, Frost's dominant motive is to reassert the value of individual perception against the fragmenting of experience | resulting from modern technology. They thus deal with one of the most fundamental concerns of twentieth-century thought.” (John F. Lynen) 

Another stout defender of the modernity of Robert Frost is Lionel Trilling. Trilling begins his argument by asserting that the manifest America of the poems of Frost is not rural. He says that complexity, uncertainty, and anxiety are as much the hallmarks of the rural poems of Frost as these are of the urban and modern poems of poets like Auden and Eliot. 

He asserts that Frost does not keep himself in the ivory tower but rather shows the grim realities of life in his poems. The poems like Design and Neither Out far Nor in Deep have an unmistakable mark of realistic portrayal, Lionel Trilling says, “I conceive that Robert Frost is doing in his poems what Lawrence says, the great writers of the classic American tradition did That enterprise of theirs was of an ultimate radicalism. 

It consisted, Lawrence, says, of two things: a disintegration and sloughing off of the old consciousness, and the forming of a new consciousness underneath... So radical a work, I need scarcely say, is not carried out by reassurance nor by the affirmation of old virtues and pieties. It is carried out by the representation of the terrible actualities of life in a new way. I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet.” Frost is a genuinely modern poet because the terror he expresses is the terror which comes out of something new. 

Frost's poetry may not have a modern style which one finds in poets like Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Auden, and Cummings, yet it is the poetry that never pretends; it is the poetry of good conversation and plain style. In it, we have a curious mixture of the humorous and the serious, of the attractive and the terrible. 

His poetry sums up the past and enlivens the present for a happy, wise future. It transcends time and space. It is universal in its appeal. It is powerful enough to express both things and thoughts. It is symbolic.

It plays on the modern technique of contrasts and suggestions. Much in his thought, he owes to modern thinkers, especially the Transcendentalists of America like Emerson. His use of the pastoral form in poetry was not an escape from reality but an advantage to study man in relation to Nature and Natural laws. Even his concern for modernity can be viewed from the following, lines of The Egg and the Machine: 

If there was one egg in it there were nine, 

Torpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather 

All packed in sand to wait the trump together, 

‘You'd better not disturb me any more’, .

 He told the distance, I'm armed for war 

The next machine that has the power to pass 

Will get this psalm in its goggle-glass. 

If Frost has written poetry without punctuation, without a capital letter, without any specific considerations for being an imagist, without epigram, it does not mean that he is not a modern poet. He is a modern poet because of his voicing the concern for the modem man, for his anxiety to save the modern from going deep into the pit of ruin.