Perhaps no poet in our history has put the best of the Yankee spirit into a book so completely, so happily, as Robert Frost. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, greatest of the early New England group, was a citizen of the world—or shall we say of the other world. [John Greenleaf] Whittier was a Quaker, with something of the Yankee thrift of tongue. [Henry Wadsworth] Long-fellow was a Boston scholar, untouched by Yankee humor. [James Russell] Lowell had some of the humor, but he condescended to it, lived above it. Edwin Arlington Robinson came from New England, but his spirit did not stay there and his poetry escapes its boundaries…. But none of these is so completely the real Yankee, and so content to confess it in his poetry, as this "plain New Hampshire farmer."… (p. 59)
There are three or four facets of this local tang in Mr. Frost's art. One is the rural background—landscape, farms, animals. We have this more or less in all the poems, and specifically in a number—Birches, The Woodpile, The Mountain, The Cow in Apple-time, The Runaway and others. And close to these are the poems of farm life, showing the human reaction to nature's processes—Mowing, Mending Wall, The Axe-helve, After Apple-picking, Putting in the Seed and others. Then there are the narratives or dialogues presenting aspects of human character: some of them dryly satirical, with a keen but always sympathetic humor, like The Code; others, Snow for example, broadly humane and philosophic; a few lit with tragic beauty—The Death of the Hired Man, the agonizing Home Burial, the exalted and half-mystical Hill Wife. And lastly we have the more personal poems, never brief confessional lyrics of emotion such as most poets give us—here Mr. Frost guards his reserves—but reflective bits like Storm Fear, Bond and Free, Flower-gathering, or meditative monologues quaintly, keenly, sympathetically humorous, the humor veiling a peering questing wisdom…. (p. 60)
This is a free excerpt of 317 words. There are 541 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Frost, Robert (Lee) 1874–1963: Critical Essay by Harriet Monroe Access Pass.
