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The Daily Living of Robert Frost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Siobhan Phillips
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Abstract

While Robert Frost's emphasis on ordinary themes has often been noted, his use of ordinary time bears further attention: his poems show how the repetitive pattern of daily living can be a creative possibility rather than an enervating necessity. His everyday verse suggests revised definitions of lyric temporality as well as new reconciliations of the dualistic oppositions structuring accounts of modernist and Americanist literature. In Frost, human repetition allows a willful independence endorsed by the natural world. The generally neglected poem “In the Home Stretch” demonstrates his most beneficent version of ordinary living, showing how retrospection and conversation are crucial elements of its practice and how marriage can promote these habits. Frost provides a contrasting, failed version of everyday practice in “Home Burial” and a comparable sense of repetitive possibility in “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 3 , May 2008 , pp. 598 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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