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