by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 27, 2007, all rights reserved. 336 views
Frost is generally considered a modernist poet; he lived and wrote during the twentieth century, along with such American titans as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Yet here, among his modernist contemporaries, Frost's uniqueness is the sharpest. The pastoral bard from New England claims our attention as an independent twentieth-century voice.
Frost shares little in common with Eliot and Pound, expatriate writers and members of High Modernism. Eliot's work is intensely complex, packed with subtle emotion and rich in classical allusions. Eliot's poems employ a rhythmic, almost harmonic use of language. Indeed, when Eliot is at his most arcane, one wonders whether the meaning of the words matters as much as the music.
Eliot's use of metaphor and simile also differentiates him from Frost. Frost is creative and striking in his own right, but Eliot's images have a power and style all their own. For instance, the evening is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." Streets twist and turn like "a tedious argument / Of insidious intent." The image of English fog also occurs several times in Eliot's poetry. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Eliot makes use not only of metaphor but of arresting personification:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle upon the windowpanes,
Licked its tongue into the corner of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that fell from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Pound, a longtime friend, advisor, and editor of Eliot's, also shares the "High Modernism" that Frost avoids. Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme" (Portrait of a Lady) is similar to Eliot's rich, European-tinged lines. For instance, Pound writes that "your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, / London has swept about you this score years / And bright ships left you this or that in fee . . . . / Great minds have sought you–lacking someone else. / You have been second always. Tragical?" Pound rivals Eliot in terms of dramatic language and classical allusions: "And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, / Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: / 'A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?'" Pound's journey here mirrors Aneas' trip to the underworld, and readers of Sophocles will recognize the blind prophet Tiresias.
Contra Pound and Eliot, Frost remains close to Earth, both in the sense that his language is accessible–almost homespun–and also in the sense that his content is often earthy and pastoral. While tackling the same emotions as Eliot and Pound–loneliness, joy, despair, optimism, skepticism–Frost chooses to address these impulses through the medium of story. Concern over fate and freedom, for example, finds expression in "Design," a poem about a spider and a moth. The unity of mankind emerges in a poem about a seemingly-insignificant bunch of flowers spared by a mower. When Frost grapples with death, he does so by telling us stories about a hired hand come home for the last time, a young boy whose hand is cut by a buzz-saw, or even a darkly comic tale about tiny ant funerals.
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