Barron is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has coedited Jewish American Poetry (University Press of New England) and Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (University of Missouri Press), as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on the poetic movement, New Formalism. Beginning in 2001, he will be the editor-in-chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay he examines the structure of Kunitz's "The War Against The Trees."

In "The War Against the Trees," Kunitz weaves together two ancient poetic forms using metrical lines that depend in every stanza on at least one set of rhymes. First, he engages the ancient pastoral tradition that depends on the opposition between mechanized civilization and the agrarian life of farms, and pastures. Second, he sets his pastoral poem into a prophetic context: he uses his poem as an occasion to charge his...