Belief and uncertainty in the poetry of Robert Frost
"Robert Pack's lifelong delight in Robert Frost's intricate, beautiful, and profound poetry shines through in the essays in this book. He confronts such broad themes as mourning, inheritance, nature, and the imagination, bringing to bear historical, psychological, Darwinian, and close-textual-reading interpretive approaches. Chapter one sets Frost's work in the tradition of nature writing, from the Book of Genesis through modern American ecological works. Chapter two examines the profound influences of the Book of Job, Darwin, and evolutionary theory on Frost's thinking. There follow chapters that structurally and philosophically compare Wordsworth's "Michael" to Frost's "Wild Grapes," focusing on the themes in inheritance, grieving, and the potency of the imagination. The reader encounters Frost as teacher and preacher, Frost's idea of how beliefs are affirmed, the simultaneous representation of adult memory and immediate childhood sensation, and the underlying duality of place and nothingness, which forms the existential background for his "stay against confusion"--The consoling purpose of Frost's poetic art."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
Middlebury College Press ; University Press of New England, Hanover [N.H.], Lebanon, N.H., ©2003
Aufsatzsammlung
xv, 242 pages ; 24 cm.
9781584653264, 9781584654568, 1584653264, 1584654562
51984772
Taking dominion over the wilderness
Darwin, the Book of Job, and Frost's A Masque of Reason
Loss and inheritance in Wordsworth's "Michael" and Frost's "Wild Grapes"
Mourning and acceptance
The modern muse: Stevens and Frost
Enigmatical reserve: Robert Frost as teacher and preacher
Robert Frost's "as if" belief
Self-deception, lying, and fictive truthfulness
Reading the landscape: place and nothingness
Parenthood and perspective