Robert Frost and Romanticism - Research Paper Example

605583 Frost and Romanticism Romanticism and realism seem like to very different poetic styles, but they actually have some characteristics in common. Both emphasize the natural world, but they do it in very different ways. Realism attempts to show the world as it is actually experienced while Romanticism wants readers to imagine the world as it should be, an idealist place with mystical components that reveal a more personal perspective. Both styles also stress the importance of individualism: the Romantics from a spiritual perspective and the Realists from a physical standpoint. One way to contrast the two styles is to think of Romanticism as a subjective account of the world and Realism as an objective rendering of the same world. When thought of in those terms, the two seem contradictory, and nearly impossible to reconcile in one poet. Yet an argument can be made that one poet, Robert Frost, managed to combine elements of both romanticism and realism in his work. Frost’s poetry hearkens backward to the Romanticism of an earlier era by referring to the natural world. Many Frost poems take place in nature, talk about nature or natural elements, and always the speakers of the poem demonstrate an awe and reverence for the natural world. Yet, Sheldon Liebman cites says, “Although Frost once called himself a romantic, he usually used the word pejoratively . . . . An overwhelming majority of Frosts critics believe that, whatever else he may have been, Frost was not a romantic” (Liebman). Liebman, however, disagrees with that point of view and goes on to explain why several of Frost’s poems would fit into the Romantic genre based on other elements of Frost’s poetry besides just the concentration on the natural world so prevalent in Frost’s poetry. But romantic poets also admire individualism, and so do realists. Several of Frost’s poems combine romantic and realist elements of individualism. Mike Freeman mentions two of them. “Many of Frosts most famous poems, such as ‘The Road Not Taken’ or ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ show a lone figure both deep in the forest and deep in introspection. Something happens to the individual there, though rarely something physical, and the reader is left to match that experience with his or her own” (Freeman). “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “”The Road Not Taken,” as well as “After Apple Picking” (and others) bring to mind a spirit of individuality and independence characteristic of Romantics, but they also have as their subject matter the more tangible, sometimes harsher, realities of life like duty, toil, and regret. Frost’s poetry captures the complex way humans both physically sense and emotionally feel about life’s moments. Yet, many characteristics of romantic poetry such as idealism and emotional passion do not really describe Frost’s poetry. “If romanticism is defined as a simple-minded picture of human experience that no sane and sober adult would take seriously, then Frost was not a romantic. And if Frosts poetry shows him to be a tough-minded realist who believed that no affirmation can be more than ‘a momentary stay,’ then, once again, Frost was not a romantic” (Liebman). Yet Frost does relate human experience, in some poems, both realistically and romantically. While Romantics challenge order and rationality, characteristics that Frost’s poetry often demonstrates, they also enjoy a sense of freedom in doing as they please. Frost frequently portrays the solitary naturalist or the farmer working his own crop, and, Frost’s poetic characters are, as Liebman points out, “tough-minded realist[s]” too. Realist poetry likes the structure imposed by reality. Accuracy and objectivity are important, and Frost demonstrates both in his descriptions of the natural world that his poems inhabit. But, they are often monologues, full of commentary, which realism does not include because realism prefers a recounting of facts without subjective commentary. Yet, realism still exists in the simplicity of Frost’s poems which use images rather than symbols and few rhetorical devices. In fact, as Dan Brown points out, two of his poems, “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Road not Taken,” and possibly others, do not use either metaphor or simile (11-12). Many of Frost’s poems center around the farming life and encounters with the natural world related as if they are occurring in the moment of his poem. Underlying his farm life settings is the notion of how hard life and work really are and yet how normal they are also. Probably Frost’s most famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” got to be as popular as it is because of the feeling that it evokes in the reader, something Romantic poems do. Romanticism is characterized by an appreciation for nature combined with a nod toward spiritualism, and “Stopping by Woods” offers both of these features in its snowy setting and its ambiguous mood. Several of the lines in the poem produce a feeling of peacefulness and remind readers of beauty, but just as quickly pulls the reader back to remind her that life is not a series of mystical moments, but cold, hard reality:”Between the woods and frozen lake/The darkest evening of the year” (7-8); “The only other sounds the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake/The woods are lovely, dark, and deep” (11-13). The “lovely woods” and sweep of “easy wind and downy flake” sound so calming, but the next lines about how dark and deep the woods are draw the reader back to real life. In this way, “Stopping by Woods” is also a realist poem. While it is hard to pin down what real experience Frost is describing for certain, the “dark and deep” aspects of the poem have been interpreted from nothing more than a way to describe the cold woods in winter to a contemplation of suicide. The earlier interpretation is more of a Romantic interpretation and the latter much more real. Many lines point out how even though the woods are lovely and evoke spiritual feeling, they also remind the poet that he must focus on his responsibilities rather than taking time to enjoy nature. First, the poet admits that the woods belong to someone else: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. (1-4) Then, his horse “gives his harness bells a shake” to pull the poet from his reverie (9). Finally, he ends the poem with “I have promises to keep,/ And miles to go before I sleep” (14-15). So, Frost includes both the romantic notion of nature and its beauty having a hypnotic effect, yet pulls the speaker and the reader back to the realities of life. Another Frost poem that combines romanticism and realism is “After Apple-Picking.” Actually, it is very difficult to separate the two genres in this poem because it is an extended metaphor as well as a description of a basic human task. One can see the realism in the task and the spiritual in the metaphor. At the 2006 Academy of Management conference, Gazi Islam and Adam Barsky presented a paper titled “The Sweetest Dreams that Labor Knows: Robert Frost and the Poetics of Work.” Clearly, this conference was a group of management professionals, yet Islam and Barsky saw Frost’s poetry as something relevant to the group. Their paper specifically refers to “After Apple-Picking” as a metaphor for work in a realistic way, as a form of harvesting apples. Yet Islam and Barsky also see the romantic notion of the harvest as a symbol for life. “Here the work of harvesting has metaphorically taken off from a simple human action to become a symbol for human life itself. The harvest is life, and the collection is the attempt to give meaning” (Islam and Barsky). The subjective and objective merge in such a way in this poem that the reader experiences both realistic detail and romantic impression at the same time. The poem’s speaker recounts how exhausted he is after a long day of picking apples which he describes in some detail. The speaker says, “For I have had too much/Of apple-picking: I am overtired” (27-28). Earlier in the poem he says, But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight (6-9) While these lines convey in a realistic way the fatigue the speaker feels, they also talk about the “strangeness” he feels. He mentions a couple of different times that he is nodding off because he is so tired and in that unclear, drowsy moment between sleep and wakefulness he experiences some spiritual moments that may work with the rest of the poem to represent something besides a tired apple farmer, weary from a day’s work. One such image is the ladder suspended between heaven and earth. This alludes to Jacob’s Ladder of biblical fame, but also to a metaphysical pathway to heaven or a pathway through life beginning at the bottom rung and ending at the top. “After Apple-Picking” is a realist representation of the duties and toils of life, but if one interprets the poem as an extended metaphor of a man near the end of his life, looking back on his life, one cannot help but to also ascribe some romantic elements to it too. While romanticism seems to mix well realism in “Stopping by Woods” and “After Apple-Picking,” the two poetic types are discernible, although the extended metaphor in “After Apple-Picking” makes the distinction more challenging. In “The Road Not Taken” the two types of poetry are far more difficult to separate and act together as one to create a work that combines both seamlessly. This poem seems like a fairly straight forward text: a forked road serves as a metaphor for choice. After all, other literature uses a forked road as a symbol of choosing a path in life, most notably perhaps when Jesus talks about the broad road leading to destruction and the narrow way to virtue. Surely on one level the poem is about making a choice and in its simple and realistic portrayal of that moment in life demonstrates realism. But, the poem is really about much more than just a choice: the poem is about the moment one makes a choice and all of the contemplation one may or may not put into the decision making process. While the attempt to recreate this moment that everyone experiences at one time or another seems like it falls most definitively into the realist camp, it also exhibits several romantic elements too. “The Road Not Taken” is meant to acknowledge the ambiguity and angst of such a moment, and may be a metaphorical recounting of at least one such decision Frost had to make, that of being a poet. In a piece about Frost’s Masques D. Bradley Sullivan says, “Our success as human beings depends on our ability to find the most fruitful metaphor of the moment, whether that moment endures a minute, and hour, or a thousand years. It depends on our sensitivity to patterns that present themselves to us, on our intuition and ability to discriminate, not on our ability to construct rational arguments, absolute answers, or rigid systems of belief” (Sullivan 314). So, even though making a decision is a very rational process, as Sullivan points out, it also can have a whole spectrum of subjectivity in the mix too. The moment of decision in the poem looks a lot like moments humans experience on occasion, a dilemma with all of its emotional baggage. There is another aspect of “The Road Not Taken” that supports an argument for it being a romantic poem as well as a realist poem and that has to do again with the moment of decision in the poem. The last lines of the poem explain that the decision affected the speaker’s life: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference” (18-20). The speaker is looking back and pointing out that the moment of decision can also be seen as a moment of fate. The result could have been different. Robert M. Rechnitz claims that Frost deliberately included this circular line of thought in the poem to recreate the actual moment of decision. “The idea of the ultimate power as a kind of fate receives the greater part of Robert Frost’s attention. Any progression of thought on this subject must be ours, for it is almost certain that Frost holds these various attitudes almost simultaneously” (88). For all of life’s decisions are really nothing but fate or randomness, depending on whether one believes in the existence of higher powers and that is a very romantic notion. Another way Frost mixes the two genres of romanticism and realism in “The Road Not Taken” is in the way it tries to recreate the thought process by using a metaphor of two roads, but must veer off into how the decision will turn out by skipping around in time in an attempt to accurately portray the way the mind works when contemplating a choice. At the moment of decision, the young persona’s moment, the roads may not seem to lead to very different conclusions. A middle-aged person may look back at the decision and wonder if he made the right one; he may even think he can still double back and take the alternate path as the poet says, " Oh, I marked the first for another day!”(13). However, as an old man, he must review his life and come to terms with his decision before he dies. Maybe it will be a good review and he will truly feel as if he made a heroic decision to take the “road less traveled.” Perhaps he will just romanticize or justify his decision that way so that he can be at peace with his life. The title “The Road Not Taken” may indicate the fact that this sort of multilayered thought is so difficult to represent that no one before has attempted it. The poem in all of its layers of meaning, representing something as ethereal and romantic as a moment in the realistic decision making process, becomes an important philosophical examination of knowing oneself and knowing how one will recollect and idealize those all important slices of life. Frost knew that life was not just cold harsh reality all the time, or at least, one did not have to interpret it that way. He may have thought romanticism was a little silly and perhaps not rational, but being a poet, he had to have realized that one’s emotions and spirit play an important part of the human makeup. Perhaps it is because Frost was so adept at combining the two types of poetry that he is counted among the masters of the craft. His ability to capture what a person feels in those moments of life when the rational mind dominates but the more sensitive spirit needs to participate too or the result is incomplete and unsatisfactory comes from his excellence in combining of the two style of poetry. Works Cited Brown, Dan. "Frosts "Road" and "Wood" redux." The New Criterion (2007): 11-14. Freeman, Mike. "Mussels, Muskrats, and Juncos: Instability in Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost." The Massachusetts Review (n.d.): 465-480. Frost, Robert. "After Apple Picking." North of Boston. New York City: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. —. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." New Hampshire. Holt, 1923. —. "The Road Not Taken." Mountain Interval. Rahway, NJ: Henry Holt & Co., 1916. Islam, Gazi and Adam Barsky. "The Sweetest Dreams that Labor Knows: Robert Frost and the Poetics of Work." Academy of Management Best Conference Paper . Atlanta, GA: The Academy of Management, 2006. A1-A6. Liebman, Sheldon W. "Robert Frost, romantic." Twentieth Century Literature 42.4 (1996): Academic Search Premier. Accessed Novemberr 30, 2011. Rechnitz, Robert M. "Nature, Tragedy, and the Question of Evil." Robert Frost. Ed. Andrea DeFusco. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. 87-90. Sullivan, D. Bradley. ""Education by Poetry" in Robert Frosts Masques." Papers on Language & Literature 22.3 (1986): 312-321. Read More