Critical Essay | Eben Bass

Eben Bass

SOURCE: "Frost's Poetry of Fear," in American Literature, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, January, 1972, pp.

In the following essay, Bass discusses the presentation of fear in the poetry of Robert Frost, centering on fears associated with individual experience, including fear of nature, and fears that threaten marriage, including the intrusion of a stranger,

Both as a private experience and as an intruder on marriage, fear is a recurring theme in the poetry of Robert Frost. Since it is alien to love, it can threaten marriage through an outside person like the Stranger in "Love and a Question," but his identity varies from poem to poem. Fear is also a private, singly-experienced thing, as in "An Old Man's Winter Night," a poem that sees fear as related to nature. Nature itself is not fear, nor does it know fear (unless, as with the Old Man, it is shocked at him), but...
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