Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert FrostRobert Pack’s lifelong delight in Robert Frost's intricate, beautiful, and profound poetry shines through in the essays in this book. He confronts such broad themes as mourning, inheritance, nature, and the imagination, bringing to bear historical, psychological, Darwinian, and close-textual-reading interpretive approaches. Chapter one sets Frost’s work in the tradition of nature writing, from the Book of Genesis through modern American ecological works. Chapter two examines the profound influences of the Book of Job, Darwin, and evolutionary theory on Frost’s thinking. There follow chapters that structurally and philosophically compare Wordsworth’s “Michael” to Frost’s “Wild Grapes,” focusing on the themes of inheritance, grieving, and the potency of the imagination. The reader encounters Frost as teacher and preacher, Frost’s idea of how beliefs are affirmed, the simultaneous representation of adult memory and immediate childhood sensation, and the underlying duality of place and nothingness, which forms the existential background for his “stay against confusion”—the consoling purpose of Frost's poetic art. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 86
Page ix
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page xiv
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 1
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 2
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 3
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Contents
Taking Dominion over the Wilderness I | 1 |
Darwin the Book of Job and Frosts A Masque of Reason | 33 |
Loss and Inheritance in Wordsworths Michael | 61 |
Mourning and Acceptance | 92 |
Stevens and Frost | 112 |
Robert Frost as Teacher and Preacher | 136 |
Robert Frosts As If Belief | 150 |
SelfDeception Lying and Fictive Truthfulness | 169 |
Place and Nothingness | 193 |
Parenthood and Perspective | 205 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Adam animals awareness beauty become belief biblical birch Book of Job brook brother Caliban comfort confront consolation covenant created creation darkness Darwin Darwinian death describes Draft Horse earth evokes evolutionary expresses fate father fear feeling fiction fictive Freud Frost's poem Frostian God's grapes grief heart human imagination implied Jared Diamond Job's landscape Lawrance Thompson live look lovers Luke Maple Maple's meaning metaphor Michael mind moral mother mourning muse mystery narrator narrator's nature nature's night nothingness Odysseus oven bird paradoxically perceived phrase physical poem's poet poet's poetic poetry Prospero Psalm 23 reader reality repression reveals Robert Frost says seen Selfish Gene sense sexual Shakespeare's Sigmund Freud Silas Silas's speaker Stevens Stevens's story superego symbolic taking dominion things thou thought tion tree truth uncertainty voice Wallace Stevens West-Running Brook William Shakespeare William Wordsworth wish woman words Wordsworth