Frost

I've never liked Frost, but he's certainly not unique among poets. This is the most extending reading I've ever done of him, which tells you something, since it was only like 15 pages of Frost. But here's what I think now:

He's certainly enjoyable to read, particularly as his style is so rural and thus readable. He's also not in the slightest bit naturalist, and also not terribly transcendentalist. (His lack of naturalism comes in spite of the fact that his poems are often very bleak and interested in "decay") He does seem to have been quite an individualist, and fascinated by nature. He was also very clearly swimming against the modernist tide, by producing such readable and mostly clear poems.

I was stunned to find the famous "The Road Not Taken" to be more complex than I realized. The famous declaration that taking the less traveled road made all the difference is actually undercut, first by the acknowledgement that, although that road does look less traveled, "Though as for that, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." And the looking back doesn't actually take place, but is imagined "I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:" I'm inclined to think that the "difference" the road made was actually trivial; the significance on this moment comes from the speaker's choice, not because the road actually made a difference or was even actually much less traveled.

A poem like "The Wood-Pile" is much more to my liking. In it, the speaker is wandering alone, far from home, and encounters a little bird which fearfully hides from him. The speaker forgets the bird and frightens him, and the bird hides behind a woodpile which someone has cut and carefully stacked, but has rested here for a long time, about to lose structural integrity, overgrown by the vine Clematis, and completely abandoned by its creator. "I thought that only/Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks/Could so forget his handiwork on which/He spent himself, the labor of his az,/And leave it there far from a useful fireplace/To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay." A bleak image, but one that also strikes me as beautiful.

Two more poems, The Death of the Hired Man, about an inconstant hired man who has come "home" to die, and "Home Burial," about a couple torn apart by the death of their son and the wife's perception that the husband did not feel it deeply enough, seem like the best candidates for naturalist readings. They do seem to have the pall of rural death and despair hanging over them, and thus in many ways could fit into Main-Traveled roads or a like set of stories. But they also seem, to me, to be lacking the deterministic and scientific underpinnings of naturalism; the deaths haunting them are more Romantic than naturalistic.