Robert Frost’s Modernist Paradox: Part I

Abstract

Robert Frost has rarely been named in a pantheon of American modernist poets, where Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore all have a place. Rather, he has often been associated with Georgian poets of the late nineteenth century and categorized as “a gentle farmer poet” of New England nature poetry or “a New England folkie” who celebrated the local Yankee spirit. Reading his biography, however, it is surprising to find that Frost actively attended all the lectures on Eastern poetry and arts and was busy with eavesdropping the latest news and avant-garde trends in New Poetry during his stay in England. This paper, thus, re-views Frost’s conscious choice to walk on the local road even after having experienced the world sentiments in London, the heart of Anglo-American literature. In particular, paying attention to his third volume, Mountain Interval, it analyses how Frost uses a common, local ovenbird as a symbol for his modernist artistic soul and how he presents his ambition to become a world-class poet by consciously becoming a local American poet and taking a flight to a new plateau through deterritorializing the spaces of literary traditions. Ultimately, it aims to examine the efficacy of a current discursive model of the core and the periphery in world literature through Frost’s modernist paradox.