Chapter 23 - Robert Frost and Tradition

Summary

Robert Frost became the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century. Frost's choice was deliberate. There is a kind of success called of esteem, he wrote in a letter early in his career and it butters no parsnips. His first volume, A Boy's Will, takes its title from Longfellow, and its opening work, called Into My Own, presents a speaker who would be only more sure of all of his thought was true. Cognition does not apprehend the world so much as work on and in it, Frost believes, through the effortful links by which one turns the alien and unknown into the significant and owned. Frost was deeply read in English-language poetry and knew classical literature in the original, his uniquely rhymed sonnet recalls a Virgilian georgic tradition manifest also in Marvell's and Wordsworth's verse. The question of the renewal marks one final philosophical theme that pervades Frost's poetry and deepens particularly his poems of marriage.