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.

Edgar Lee Masters

I had never heard of the minor American poet Edgar Lee Masters, but he seems to be, if not a naturalist, someone who is interesting in terms of naturalism, which I did not much expect to find in poetry. The Norton Anth of Am Lit describes his most important work, Spoon River Anthology, in terms that sound very much like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Garland's Main-Traveled Roads: the dead speakers of interrelated poems in the anthology "continue their loves and quarrels beyond the grave. Their dissonant voices converge in a lament for suppressed and wasted lives, only rarely varied by joy or gusto. Sex has driven them, but given little pleasure. They long for the sympathy that they withhold from each other. Yet the poems as a group are compassionate, not judgmental" (1101). Save for that last line, that sounds like a perfectly naturalist description. And individual poems also seem to take up naturalist points.

Serepta Mason believes that she could have flowered in life, but a "bitter wind" prevented her from. Like Maggie, her environment prevented her growth. "Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed/Who do not know the ways of the wind/And the unseen forces/That govern the processes of life." This sounds like a perfectly naturalistic account of the complex social forces that prevent the seed of humanity from flowering.

Trainor, the Druggist notes that, like chemicals, people's offspring are the unpredictable outcome of contending forces. "There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,/Good in themselves, but evil towards each other:/He oxygen, she hydrogen, /Their son, a devastating fire." In this poem, people are just chemical elements, and their offspring are the product of a chemical reaction. That's not far from a naturalist theory of offspring and racial stock.

Margaret Fuller Slack's poem is a feminist lament; she could have been another George Eliot "But for an untoward fate." The poem ends with a pun; after marrying the druggist (seemingly not Trainor) who promised her leisure time to write a novel, Mrs. Slack bears 8 children and dies of lockjaw after piercing herself with a needle while washing for a baby. She concludes "Sex is the curse of life!" Both sex (as her gender) and sex (as the force that engendered her children) locked her into her fate.

Abel Melveny's situation doesn't make too much sense; he hoarded "every kind of machine that's known" but, with no use for most of them and no shed to store them in, had to watch them "Getting rusted, warped, and battered." After noting that he never used a fine machine, he concludes "I saw myself as a good machine/That Life had never used." Abel, like his tools, was an automaton, who, due to the hand of fate, never saw use.

Lucinda Matlock has the only really positive poem; her life is a catalog of pleasure taking and joyous events, save for the fact that she lost 8 of her 12 children. But she takes a naturalist stance towards those that she sees not enjoying life around her: "What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness/Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes?/Degenerate sons and daughters,/Life is too strong for you -/It takes life to love life." Lucinda here, I think, is referencing the reservoir; only by bringing energy to life can one make something of life. This, like the difference between Clyde Griffiths and his cousin, makes all the difference: strong drives can bring pleasure, the lack of drives results in degeneration.