Dana Gioia

Both poets, Frost and Heaney wrote in the pastoral tradition, drawing on the natural landscape of Bellaghy, Co Derry and Frost and the farmland of New England, Massachusetts. Respectively Frost is an influence on Heaney evident in the ‘sound of sense’ and Heaney borrowed the Frostian voice of rural vernacular with his use of unadorned language and natural speech rhythms, giving both poets work a conversational intimacy. Likewise, both poets used the everyday quotidian to illuminate universal truths and to extrapolate deeper meanings from ordinary. Similarly they used interactions with the natural world to produce profound revelations about the past, mortality, human loss, childhood, the creative process, journeys and self-discovery.

abstract, painted with energetic brush strokes, it has some kind of silence to it. Dana Schutz did not use her usual tropical color palette to paint this painting. The artist used yellow, brown and white tones mixed with black and red. Image is showing Emmett’s head and a torso quite zoomed in. However, the angle is different from a photograph, in a painting Emmett is positioned horizontal to a viewer. Emmett is wearing a black tuxedo with a white shirt. The tuxedo is painted carefully, with clean lines and with a red rose positioned on tuxedo pants, which I found quite surprising, because usually flowers are placed on lapels of tuxedos. Emmett’s face is destructed, there is a visible deep cut in the paint. A lot of paint was used to paint

While the poems he uses in his article may depict skittishness and an elusive voice, many of the poems in The Best of the Best of American Poetry edited by Robert Pinksy represent modern poetry as having a focal point and self-consciousness of narrative. This anthology contains poems from the best of American poetry from recent years that have appeared in magazines and other published articles. Hoagland may think that narrative and continuity are things of the past but this compilation of today’s poetry illustrates a different take on the argument at hand.

Dana Raigrodski is a Lecturer and Director of the General LL.M. Program at the University of Washington School of Law, as well as the Executive Director of Global Affairs at the Law School. She serves as a Commissioner on the Washington State Supreme Court Gender & Justice Commission and as member of the University of Washington Women’s Center Anti-Trafficking Task Force. Dr. Raigrodski’s scholarship and research interests examine human trafficking, migration and globalization, criminal procedure and jurisprudence, feminist legal theories, and law and development. She teaches courses on law and globalization, American legal system and research methods, and comparative legal studies. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Raigrodski practiced law for

Working Thesis: Robert Frost applies imagery and figurative language to create vivid visual images with his narrations, creating a well-known style as a modern poet while incorporating traditional 19th century poetic practices.

Robert Frost is an iconic poet in American literature today, and is seen as one of the most well known, popular, or respected twentieth century American poets. In his lifetime, Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and the Congressional Gold Medal. However, Robert Frost’s life was not always full of fame and wealth; he had a very difficult life from the very beginning. At age 11, his father died of tuberculosis; fifteen years later, his mother died of cancer. Frost committed his younger sister to a mental hospital, and many years later, committed his own daughter to a mental hospital as well. Both Robert and his wife Elinor suffered from depression throughout their lives, but considering the premature deaths of three of their children and the suicide of another, both maintained sanity very well. (1)

Modern American poetry could be described on scale of maturity where most poets can fit easily, ranging from childlike simplicity to adultlike restraint. Most poets except for E.E. Cummings and Robert Frost, two of the most well known American poets that show either maturity or simplicity on the surface, but the stark opposite when analyzed closely. E.E. Cummings would fit the more childlike approach in his fantastical imagery, but his poems hold hidden themes that elude the children who read his poems. For Robert Frost, his poems sound soothing and simple when analyzed, but are very refined on the surface, which appeal to the reader’s rational sense. In the poems “Once by the Pacific” by Robert Frost and “When Serpents Bargain” by E.E. cummings,

Many of Robert Frost’s poems and short stories are a reflection of his personal life and events. Frost’s short story “Home Burial” emulates his experience living on a farm and the death of two of his sons. Frost gives an intimate view into the life and mind of a married couples’ struggle with grief and the strain it causes to their marriage. The characters Frost describes are synonymous, physically and emotionally, to his own life events.

Many of his poems, particularly “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road not Taken,” “Provide, Provide,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Death of the Hired Man,” are true portrayals of the doubts, insecurities, fears; the obligation to keep our promises, our duties and other compulsions; the inner questionings; loneliness; lovelessness; the lack of mutual trust, communications and understanding that perpetually permeate and make our lives problematic, things that will always be relevant to our existence. The same effortlessness with which he transcends the geographical limits of the New England territory

The literary era in which Robert Frost wrote was the modernism era. This era was a time when poets, and artists in general, were starting to rebel against the “normal” way to write

Robert Frost is the author of Out Out--, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Nothing Gold can Stay. His literary work communicates deep meaning through the use of metaphoric language and deception. Being raised most of his life on a farm; his works perceive the natural life of a normal person while out in nature. “Frost believes that the emphasis on everyday life allows him to communicate with his readers more clearly; they can empathize with the struggles and emotions that are expressed in his poems and come to a greater understanding of ‘Truth’ themselves” (Robert Frost: Poems Themes).

Robert Frost uses metaphor and symbolism extensively in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, developing deeper and more complex meanings from a superficially simple poem. Frost’s own analysis contributes greatly to our appreciation of the importance of metaphor, claiming that “metaphor [is] the whole of thinking,” inviting the reader to interpret the beautiful scene in a more profound way. However, the multitude of possible interpretations sees it being read as either carefully crafted lyric, a “suicide poem, [or] as recording a single autobiographical incident” . Judith Oster argues, therefore, that the social conditions individual to each reader tangibly alter our understanding of metaphor. Despite the simplicity of language,

Have you ever read a poem that was so well written that you could almost imagine yourself being the person in the poem and feeling all of the emotions portrayed by the speaker? In the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, written by Robert Frost in 1923, you receive that exact feeling. The poem is about a man stopping to admire the beauty that are the woods on a snowy night on his way to complete his task. This poem had many parts that could be well analyzed, which was surprising for how short the poem truly was. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” had many literary terms including the structure of the stanzas, symbols and imagery in each line, and the theme and tone of the entire poem.

What is customary and, therefore, stereotypical of modern artistic thought is the belief that only one central meaning can be gathered from any one reading; that these singular interpretations support, give credence and justify hegemonic forces or grand narratives in society. Defining the term “modern” in his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard “designate[s]” this name and movement to “any science … legitimat[ing] itself … [by] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative” (xxiii). It is thus to the disgust of postmodernists to find Robert Frost’s name, poems and poetry listed with such a narrow-minded, self-aggrandizing, so-called sophisticated group (like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell) since Frost was not a poet who believed science and language—nor the source of science and language—to be singular, but rather ulterior, double speaking or multiplicitous. In short, Frost believed duplicity or duplicitous interpretations should be drawn out of the reader with the help of the author through the medium of poetic form which, to him, paradoxically eliminates the author’s influence on the reader.

Poems are a style of story-telling, of writing, but they are also an art form. The writers of these tales use many methods to add spectacular drama to every day experiences. Twisting the meaning of words allows the authors to vividly paint a portrait of the moment they’re capturing. In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”, Hayden uses simple words to paint a detailed picture in only a few lines. He shows us not only the bleakness of winter, but highlights how small, daily acts of love are easily forgotten.