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Robert Frost Conversational Style

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Shahin Damoui
Daniel Yu
Writing 30
10 June 2012
Robert Frost’s Conversational Style and Mock-Heroic Tone My portfolio consists of a collection of both heroic and tragic poems that incorporate the blank verse form. These poems imitate Robert Frost’s mock-heroic dialogue and conversational style. Three of these poems in particular, “The Boxer”, “The Boy In My Dreams,” and “The Interview” draw from Frederick Turner’s “The Neural Lyre” and Maurice Charney’s “Robert Frost’s Conversational Style,” in attempting to emulate a style that is an artfully fabricated imitation of ordinary conversation. My poems, like those of Frost, characterize a tone of amused and ironic detachment. Robert Frost has a unique conversational style that is unlike any …show more content…

In “The Boxer,” I attempted to deemphasize the magnitude of the punches the fighter was throwing to illustrate the insignificance of the actual fight itself. I wanted the emphasis to be put on the entirety of the fighter’s career, not merely one fight. In Robert Frost’s “The Death Of A Hired Man,” many of the effects that Turner claims are inherent in metered poetry are illustrated. It has a sharp emphasis on narrative as it tells its dramatic story about the return of Silas, the hired man, to the farm of Mary and Warren. Most of the conversation in the poem is between Mary and her husband Warren. Frost characterizes Mary as a sympathetic character, while Warren is characterized by his skeptical demeanor. Many of the characteristics of metered poetry, according to Frederick Turner, are present in Frost’s “The Death Of A Hired Man.” Turner, in his piece “The Neural Lyre,” states the universal nature of metered poetry. He claims, “all over the world human beings compose and recite poetry in poetic meter; all over the world the meter has line-length of about three-seconds, stretching sometimes to about four and a half for solemn poetry, and contracting sometimes as little as two for comic poetry (Neural Lyre 277).” Metrical verse is characterized as universal, archaic, and magical. This is seen throughout Frost’s “The Death of a Hired Man,” in which the blank verse is supple and moves easily, mimicking the fluidity of the conversational style. Frost incorporates a regular

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