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Robert Frost Research Paper

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Frost has been known to deem all writing devoid of human tones to be poor writing on the account that a reader cannot be expected to care about what is written by an uncaring author. He came to criticize poetry in which “all tones of human speech had been eliminated, leaving sound of sense without roots in experience” () after being criticized himself for writing in the opposite manner, a critique that led to the epiphany of that being his exact intention. It was Ezra Pound who deemed Frost as having “the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing as he saw it” () but Frost had no intention of being associated with the Imagists. He fought hard against the misinterpretation of his poetry, striving to embody the unconscious principles …show more content…

One of his main goals as a poet was to come to a point of creating poems that left no room for misinterpretation, a difficult task taking into account the Pandora’s box of intonation possibilities he had opened upon conceiving the Sound of Sense. Achieving this goal would entail fine-tuned manipulation of tone and careful guidance over the reader’s “theatrical” execution, all hinged on the foundational arrangement and choice of words. It may unfortunately be concluded that Frost never attained this goal given that his public readings would consistently result in audience members exclaiming that they now knew how to read the poems correctly after having heard Frost read them himself. This is not altogether a poetic failure, however, considering that having set his personal expectations high, he reached what is perhaps as close to unmistakable intonation as reasonably possible with all credit due to his theory of Sound of …show more content…

John F. Sears argues on behalf of this claim in his statement that “it is much easier to fix a visual image on the page, since you can nail it there with the nouns that name it and the verbs that make it active, than it is to fix the tone of a sentence” (476). Logically, this holds true, despite the fact that it contributes to a debate that is more or less unproductive on the topic of sight or sound as poetically superior. Frost’s own treatment of the two senses can be simplified as the eyes reading the words and the ears hearing the sentence sounds, though he claims the ear to be the “only true reader and writer” (). While the eye reads “My father used to say…”, the ear hears the tone of moral instruction; the statement is bluntly factual at eye level, but its tone communicates a sense of assurance in reverent memory of a father’s moral instruction. This theory of course pre-supposes that all tones follow the conventional understandings of common phrases, but the Sound of Sense does not only emulate the sounds of individual word meanings and idioms. For instance, the sound of a sentence is not limited to enhancing its meaning, it can in fact be manipulated to have a subversive effect. The irony that can be expressed through tone allows for

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