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Robert Frost

Comments & Themes


Study Questions. You can reflect and write a paper on the following topics:

    • The new pastoral mode

 

    • The ethics of love and labor

 

    • Frost's romantic influences

 

    • Realism, naturalism and romantic trends in Frost's poems

 

    • Analyze one of the following poems to show how Frost's poetic technique itself serves as his own "momentary stay against confusion": "Once by the Pacific," "Desert Places," or "Design."

 

    • Discuss the limitations and isolation of the individual in either a social or natural environment, plus the related theme of how difficult it is for the self to understand existence.

 

    • Discuss the ambiguity and darkness of nature. Is it a source of truth and wisdom?

 

    • Discuss Frost's treatment of entropy, doom, and extinction.

 

    • Frost's use of irony

 

    • The dark designs, free will, apocalyptic visions and optimism

 

    • Many of Frost's poems gravitate between heaven and earth as in "Birches", "A Steeple on the House", "One more brevity"

 

    • Nature and man

 

    • The encounter between the self and the world

 

    • Belief and skepticism in Frost's poems

 

    • The motif of home in "Death of a Hired Man" and "Home Burial".

 

    • Compare Wordsworth "The Solitary Reaper" and Frost's "Mowing"

 

    • Nihilism and belief in Frost's poems.

 

    • Frost's way of "making it new"

 

    • "Birches" and Shelley's "Adonais"

 

    • Frost's dramatic dialogues and Eliot's interior monologue. Compare "Death of a Hired Man", "Home Burial" and Prufrock

 

    • The quest for truth "For, once then, something"

 

    • American myth of self-reliance and "The Road not taken"

 

  • The poet as craftsman and the art of poetry in "The Oven Bird", "Hyla Brook", Mowing, The Pasture