Practical Class 7

The Emergence of Modern American Literature, 1900–1945

American Poetry
American poetry arguably reached its peak in the early-to-mid-20th century, with such
noted writers as Wallace Stevens and his Harmonium (1923) and The Auroras of Autumn
(1950), T. S. Eliot and his The Waste Land (1922), Robert Frost and his North of Boston (1914)
and New Hampshire (1923), Hart Crane and his White Buildings (1926) and the epic cycle, The
Bridge (1930), Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and his epic poem about his New Jersey
hometown, Paterson, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Langston
Hughes, in addition to many others.
1. Read the guide on early-20th century poetry from “American Poetry 1900-
1980” by Mary McGann and Kathe Davis Finney. Characterize the developments
of poetry in the U.S.
Poetry and the search for form
With the death of Walt Whitman in 1892, American poetry came to a longer pause. In
the second half of the nineteenth century American life changed rapidly: the western frontier
had all but disappeared by 1890, the industrial revolution had mechanized American labor and
industry, the number of farms was shrinking as the children of farmers moved to cities, and
huge waves of European immigrants swelled the populations of cities. The language and the
conditions of modern life were changing radically. A new poetry seemed needed. With few
exceptions, however, the poets of late nineteenth century America wrote an artificial verse,
derivative of Romantic and English models, full of classical allusions and lofty ideals, with little
reference to the changing social and political realities around it. As the critic Roy Harvey Pearce
put it, these poets, whose names are hardly recognized or remembered, were “utterly at a loss
to deal with live situations in live language.”
What the United States needed at the turn of the century was a poet or poets to carry on
the Adamic tradition of earlier American writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman,
and to translate that tradition into modern terms. Those writers had seen themselves and their
fellow Americans as the new men who would create a new world. Pearce points out that the
strength of American poetry had derived from “the poet’s inability or refusal at some depth of
consciousness to wholly accept his culture’s system of values.” The poet is not only an Adam, a
newly created and self-creating pioneer, he is a prophet and a rebel, warning his culture, and if
necessary, opposing it.
American poetry became independent sometime between 1910 and 1920; 1912 is the
year often named. That year Robert Frost went to England, where he published his first book.
There he met and was promoted by Ezra Pound, already busy forging transatlantic modernism.
Imagism, which has been called the most important single literary movement of the 20th
century, is also usually dated from 1912. and the same year also saw the founding of Poetry
magazine by Harriet Monroe in Chicago, with Pound as European editor. Poetry would help
launch the major experimental movements in American poetry. It introduced a vigorous
naturalistic movement by publishing the poetry of E.A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Robert
Frost, and Carl Sandburg.
The Beginnings of Modern American Poetry.
A slightly older contemporary of Pound’s, Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-
1935) had already published several books of poetry by 1912. Although his work seems old-
fashioned now, he was the first of the modern poets to reject the nineteenth-century
conventions and artificial forms which had dominated it for several decades (with the exception
of Whitman who died in 1892 and Emily Dickinson who remained outside the mainstream and
undiscovered and unpublished until the 1920s). Robinson took a novelist’s interest in the
foibles, ironies, and failures inherent in human existence. Like Frost and Sandburg, and Edgar
Lee Masters in his popular Spoon River Anthology (1915), Robinson sought to define human
life in terms of actualities. Also like Masters, he felt a strong affinity for Walt Whitman and his
poetry. He shared with Whitman a passionate interest in the ways in which internal
psychological reality is reflected in external reality. Robinson’s poetry reflects a desire to
express and explain human problems – failure to communicate, alcoholism, suicide, illusions,
loss of love.
Philosophically, Robinson was strongly influenced by Emerson’s ideas, and by the
spiritual philosophy of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who emphasized a Unitarian concept of God,
a rejection of materialism, and a transcendental reliance on one’s inner spirit. From
Swedenborgianism Robinson developed the notion that each individual is responsible for
himself or herself, that everyone creates one’s own heaven or hell. These are theses which
surface again and again in his poetry. However, these notions of self-reliance and individualism
are combined with what he called “a sort of deterministic negation of the general futility that
appears to be the basis of ‘rational thought,’” his sad and ironic realization that one’s choices
are limited and shaped by social environment. Characters like Richard Cory (who “went home
and put a bullet through his head”), Luke Havergal, who seemed haunted by inexplicable loss,
Miniver Cheevy, “who wept that he was even born,” and Eben Flood, whose alcoholism and
loneliness make him a pathetic figure – these are the people of Tilbury Town, Robinson’s
fictitious community based on Gardiner, Maine, where he grew up. Most of his characters,
while nostalgic for traditional humanistic values, have themselves lost touch with higher
values. They end up defeated by greed, sex, and the struggle for social status, as well as by the
growing depersonalization of their society.
Robert Frost (1874-1963) was a contemporary of Robinson’s, and also committed
himself to New England portraits, although his vision is at once more local and more universal.
The farm life he celebrates in so many poems was never his main occupation, though he did
eventually own a farm in New Hampshire, where he lived till the end of his long life. The rural
and the local provide his characters, events and setting, as even a random sampling of his titles
will show: “The Wood Pile,” “Mending Wall,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “An Old Man’s
Winter Night.” Rejecting Robinson’s poetic diction, he seemed to offer an even greater realism.
Like Robinson and the Georgian poets with whom he was sometimes grouped, Frost
stayed with traditional verse forms, and his declaration that free verse was like playing tennis
without a net has Become famous. But he was a radical if subtle innovator, whose technical
accomplishments are still being recognized. His greatest achievement was to capture in formal
verse the sound of colloquial, spoken, American English. More specifically, “his idiom is
educated but talked American, with a slight wash of country vocabulary and often a Yankee
intonation,” in David Perkins’ description. Wordsworth’s “language such as men do use” is
echoed in Frost’s insistence on what he called “the speaking tone of voice.” We may hear this
tone in a flat statement like “Ice storms do that” (“Birches”), or from the same poem,
... Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
He often tends toward the aphoristic as in “The Death of the Hired Man”:
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take your in.
This illustrates also his frequent humor, dry, perhaps wry, and subtle, even sly.
His apparent simplicity is deceptive. His poems are nearly always more subtle and
complex than is obvious at first reading. Richard Poirier, one of his best critics, has pointed out
that his work is as allusive as Pound’s or Eliot’s, though the allusions are never obvious or
insisted upon. Frost was deeply familiar not only with the English poetic tradition but also with
the classics, particularly Horace, from whom he seems to have taken his idea of reserve, the
deliberate self-limitation he practiced in language, theme, region, and genre.
Frost was a modern master of the narrative poem, a traditional and popular form, at a
time when narrative was being rejected even by novelists in favor of mythic structures and
other non-narrative forms of continuity. Frost deliberately encouraged a simple reading,
creating the public persona of a rough, blunt-spoken but kindly old homespun Yankee sage.
This was the image which Americans took to their hearts. He became the only great American
poet to enjoy a national popular following during his own lifetime. His books sold over half a
million copies and he won four Pulitzer Prizes. In 1960 he was asked to read a poem at John F.
Kennedy inauguration. Later he toured Russia as a goodwill ambassador, and met Khrushchev.
He hoped through his own honors to win a more public place for poetry in American life.
 In recent years critics have reacted against Frost’s simplistic, folkloric public image.
Especially since the publication of Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography – which
Frost had forbidden during his lifetime – critics have uncovered a “darker” side of Frost. It is
indeed possible to read a very bleak view of humans and their place in the universe in such
poems as “The Subverted Flower,” “Out, out–, “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “The Oven Bird,” “Design,” and the late, stark “The Draught Horse.”
Certainly Frost did not have an easy life. Abused by his father, he learned his love of
poetry – and some Swedenborgianism – from his schoolteacher mother. He dropped out of
college almost immediately after beginning. His early life was so grim he contemplated suicide.
Five children were born before Frost took a teaching job in 1906. He was still unpublished when
he sold his farm five years later and made the trip to England that changed his life. His sister
was institutionalized for insanity, a son committed suicide, his wife died in 1938.
A psychological interest is apparent in much of Frost’s work, especially in many of the
dialogue poems. In “The Witch of Coos,” a widow breaks a 30-year silence to tell a stranger her
bizarre story of betrayal and guilt. In “The Hill Wife” a young woman impulsively abandons her
husband and home:
Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.
Frost’s powerful descriptions of the natural world always suggest correspondences in
internal human reality, what he called the inner and the outer weather. Frost seems to continue
the romantic tradition, with his obvious affinity for Wordsworth, his brooks and trees and
villages, his homely characters and simple talk. But he is committed to a “classical” ideal of
restraint, control, and balance. He spoke approvingly of “retreat,” pointing to the word’s
religious sense. He pokes fun at aspirations to the transcendent or to ultimate truth. As David
Perkins says about his metaphors of ascent, as in “After Apple-Picking” or “Birches”: “you do
not get very far and come down soon.”
Frost might be said to write, as “The Oven Bird” sings about “what to make of a
diminished thing.” In this is he like Eliot, although their styles are so different. He is modernist
also in his focus on craft and form, and in his pervasive irony. What he rejected were
cosmopolitanism, any obvious use of anthropology or myth, and the radically experimental.
Like the realistic and naturalistic novelists before him, he seemed to be recording a chunk of
democratic American reality.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) genuinely possesses the simplicity of which Robert Frost
is accused. He cast himself energetically into the Whitman tradition of bard, singer, and yea-
sayer, though it has been pointed out that he is “more immediately sociological than Whitman.”
He said he wanted to “come to grips with life in the United States as might manifest its very
quality and meaning.” Many of his techniques also echo Whitman’s: apposition and direct
address, personification, apostrophe, and most of all cataloguing. In his famous “Chicago” he
sings to the city, characterizing it by naming it: “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker,
Stacker of Wheat,” and so on. Like Whitman he accepts what convention would condemn.
“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,...” but “I give them back the sneer and say to
them: / Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse
and strong and cunning.” In The People, Yes he uses his poetry not to analyze or question, but
to affirm the value of the people as a social, cultural, and political entity. Like Whitman,
Sandburg was a travelling journalist, a populist and political idealist whose vision for America
centered on Abraham Lincoln as a democratic hero. Sandburg’s monumental six-volume
biography of Lincoln views him as a product of the common people and a symbol of populist
Democracy.
When Sandburg is criticized, it is for his one-sided and simplistic vision, and for the
limitations of his poetic technique. He cared much less about poetic form than about his
message – and that was too often superficial, an idealized vision unsupported by industrial
actualities. Leaving analysis to others, Sandburg seems content to be a bardic recorder and
folkloric master-singer.
 Sandburg is a lesser poet than Frost, and Vachel Lindsay lesser than Sandburg. But they
share a commitment to the local, and to “democratic” colloquial speech. Vachel Lindsay
(1879-1931) wanted to write verse that could be “two-thirds sung and one-third written.” His
major strength as a poet is his use of euphony, rhythm, music and musical sound to create a
musical poetry which he performed, recited, and sang on stages across the country. His use of
motifs from jazz, folk ballads, and popular music energized his poetry and influenced such later
poets as Langston Hughes. His most famous poems, “The Congo” and “General William Booth
Enters into Heaven,” resemble chants or songs; the poem about General Booth even carries the
notation “To be sung to the tune of ‘The Blood of the Lamb’ with indicated instruments.”
Lindsay became a popularly acclaimed poet, travelling throughout the country to give
performances of his poetry. The appeal of his poems seems to lie in their musical sound and
rhetorical quality, but, like Sandburg, Lindsay is more a singer and recorder than a prober.
(Mary McGann, Kathe Davis Finney. American Poetry 1900-1980. P. 80-92)

Edwin Arlington Robinson

(1869-1935)
Solitude tends to magnify one’s ideas about individuality; it directs attention to neglect
and sharpens one’s sympathy with failure...It renders a man suspicious of the whole natural
plan and leads him to wonder whether the invisible powers are a fortuitous issue of misguided
cosmos, or the cosmos itself, everything, is a kind of accident.
Quoted in Louis Untermeyer’s Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Reappraisal.

Edwin Arlington Robinson was a poet of transition. He lived at the time following the
Civil War when America was rebuilding and changing rapidly and when the dominant values
of the country seemed to be growing increasingly materialistic. Robinson’s poetry was
transitional, evaluating the present by using traditional forms and by including elements of
transcendentalism and Puritanism. Robinson spent his childhood in a small town in Maine, a
town which furnished him a setting for many of his poems as well as models for his characters.
His father was a prosperous merchant; his mother had been a schoolteacher. The parents were
primarily interested in their two older sons and tended to ignore Edwin, though they
recognized his exceptional intelligence. While fond of his family, Edwin felt him-self an
outsider among them, as he also felt alienated from the society of his town. Robinson studied
at Harvard from 1891 to 1893 and afterwards returned to Maine to stay for three years.
Miserable and lonely most of the time, he moved to New York in 1895. His first volume of
poems had been published while he was at home in Maine; in 1897 a second volume appeared.
But he prospered neither as a poet nor as a businessman and ended by working as a checker of
loads of shale during the building of the New York subway. In earning his living as a writer
Robinson experienced the same difficulties as Hawthorne had fifty years before and was forced
to the same humiliating expedients. Hawthorne checked sacks of coal as they were loaded in
Boston Harbor; Robinson checked shale. Franklin Pierce, a grateful President, had rewarded
his friend and campaign biographer, Hawthorne, with a post in the Sales Customs House and
then with a more lucrative post as consul in Liverpool. Just so another President of the United
States, Theodore Roosevelt, found Robinson’s poetry impressive and helped him get a clerkship
in the New York Customs House, where he worked until 1910. He sometimes may have
encountered the ghost of Melville, who had spent the last lonely years of his life there, haunted
by the feeling that he had failed as a writer.
Suddenly, with the poetic revival which preceded World War I, Robinson began to play
a major role as a poet. After going his own way quietly for so many years, he be-came widely
read and exerted a strong influence on other poets, notably Frost. He was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry three times in the 1920s, a record exceeded only by Frost, who received the
prize four times in all.
The core of Robinson’s philosophy is the belief that man’s highest duty is to develop his
best attributes as fully as possible. Success is measured by the intensity and integrity of his
struggle; failure consists only in a lack of effort. Robinson was most interested in people who
had either failed spiritually, or who seemed failures to the world but had really succeeded in
gaining spiritual wisdom. Despite his apparent pessimism he refused to subscribe to a
naturalistic view of life. Being by nature introspective and conscious of psychological depths,
he was acutely aware of the spiritual side of man and relatively uninterested in the surface
aspects of man’s life as a social creature.
Robinson’s best known statement on the hollowness of conventional success is the lyric
poem, “Richard Cory.” Although everyone respects and envies Cory, one night he fires a bullet
through his head. We are left asking why, and Robinson does not give an answer. We can only
suppose that what other people think and feel is not as important as what a person himself
believes. Since Cory knows his life is worthless in spite of his “success,” he puts an end to it. In
the other poems we see Robinson’s compassion and humor. They are differently blended in
each poem. “Miniver Cheevy” is marked by a broad, hyperbolic humor. The character whom
the poem displays is a figure of fun. How-ever, the humor is wry; we can laugh at the drunkard
who drinks to escape, only as long as we ignore his plight. There is more than a hint of self-
portraiture in Miniver’s deluded enchantment with a past which never was. The poem suggests,
in a comic way, what Eugene O’Neill portrays in The Iceman Cometh: the survival value for the
unsuccessful of delusion plus drink; for those who, like Cory, face up to the truth of things, a
bullet may be inevitable. We feel an even greater sympathy when we read “Mr. Flood’s Party.”
For here is an old man, now completely friendless, his only company a jug of liquor. He is so
lonely he talks to himself; so friendless that he has nothing left in life. Nevertheless, the
situation Robinson describes to us is never mawkish. We sympathize, but we smile at the same
time. Robinson uses mock-heroic comparisons and mock solemnity here with a delicate effect
absent in “Miniver Cheetry.” He invites our sympathy; he does not command it. When he
compares Mr. Flood with the great medieval warrior Roland, blowing his horn to summon his
comrades in an epic battle, he expects us to remember that splendid as Roland was in that
battle, he died without his companions ever answering the call of his horn. Not the least of
Robinson’s skill lies in another technique: his ability to manage rhythms and sounds to convey
the meaning and mood of the poem. A good example is the perfectly modulated concluding
lines of “Mr. Flood’s Party.” Robinson could have ended the poem with emphasis; he chooses
instead to soften the rhythms and to diminish the ending with two dependent clauses. Our
voice drops naturally and then levels off as we finish reading the poem the old man’s horn
echoes and dies, unanswered.

2. Read the poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson (Selections I – III), answer

the questions in Discussion Section in written form.
SELECTION I
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44982/richard-cory
 SELECTION II
Miniver Cheevy
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44978/miniver-cheevy
_________________________________
1. Miniver Cheevy: the name of the character gives a hint as to his personality. “Miniver” was a
kind of fur popular during the Middle Ages; “Cheevy” echoes such adjectives as childish and
peevish.
2. Thebes: name of two ancient cities, one in Egypt, the other in Greece.
3. Camelot: the legendary site of King Arthur’s palace and court in southwestern England.
4. Priam’s neighbors: Priam, the last king of Troy, an ancient city in Asia Minor. He perished
in a war with his neighbors, the Greeks, who conquered Troy.
5. on the town: living on charity.
6. Medici: the ruling family of Florence, Italy, during the 15th and 16th centuries, noted both
for their generous patronage of art and for lavish living and wickedness.
 SELECTION III
Mr. Flood’s Party
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon

Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”

Alone, as if enduring to the end

A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child

Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Only a very little, Mr. Flood—

For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—
 “For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.
_____________________________
1. harvest moon: the full moon occurring nearest to the autumnal equinox (September 23). At
that time there is full moonlight on cloudless nights almost from sunset to sunrise, which
provides extra hours of light for farmers harvesting crops in the fields.
2. Roland: legendary hero of medieval France who, left to protect Charlemagne’s retreat from
invading Moslem armies, refused to blow his horn to call for help.
3. auld lang syne: literally, “old long ago,” a Scottish phrase now used to mean “the good old
times” or “old time’s sake.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Richard Cory
1. What is the relationship between Richard Cory and the speaker?
2. How does rhyme and meter move the poem forward?
3. What does the poem suggest about envy?
4. What does the poem suggest about privilege?
5. What details of the poem help to make the ending a surprise? Why do you think Cory
killed himself?
6. What do you think the “light” is in the first line of the fourth stanza?
7. Does the poem say anything about human insight?
8. Compare the problem faced by Richard Cory with that of Miniver Cheevy. In what
sense are their solutions to the problem similar?
Miniver Cheevy
1. Do you think Miniver really would have been happy in ancient Troy, Camelot, or in the
Florence of the Medicis?
2. What emotion do you feel for Miniver?
3. Compare Miniver with Eben Flood. Which do you admire most? Why?
4. Do you find humor in this poem? Cite examples.
Mr. Flood’s Party
1. What do you think has brought Eben Flood to his present condition?
2. Describe the tone of “Mr. Flood’s Party” and explain how the verse form and diction
help create it.
3. Cite examples of the poet’s (1) pessimism and (2) wry humor found in the poem.
4. Explain the meaning of the following lines from stanza four: “He set the jug down slowly
at his feet/ With trembling care, knowing that most things break;/ And only when
assured that on firm earth/ It stood, as the uncertain lives of men/ Assuredly did not…”
(Carl Bode. Highlights of American Literature. Washington, D.C.:
English Language Programs Division Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
United States Information Agency, 1995. P. 156-162)
3. Read the Study Guide on Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy”.
Use it as a sample of literary interpretation in your further analysis of modern
American poetry.
Type of Work
Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy” is a dramatic lyric poem centering on a
twentieth-century misfit who dreams of living in the heroic age of sword and horse. Charles
Scribner’s Sons published it in 1910 as part of a collection entitled Town Down the River.
 Setting
Although the poem mentions no specific locale, readers of Robinson’s poetry know that
Miniver Cheevy lives in fictional Tilbury Town, a community modeled on Robinson’s
hometown of Gardiner, Maine. Gardiner is on the Kennebec River in southwestern Maine a few
miles south of the state capital, Augusta. Robinson used Tilbury Town as the setting of many
of his poems, including the highly popular “Richard Cory”, although his poems seldom mention
the town by name.
Title Meaning
“Miniver Cheevy” is an unusual but apt name for the poem and its misfit dreamer.
Consider that Miniver is the name of a white or gray fur used in earlier times to trim the
ceremonial robes of royals and nobles. In his dreams about the past, Mr. Cheevy perhaps sees
himself in such fine robes as an important person at the court of a king—or as the king himself.
Consider, too, that Cheevy resembles words derived from the French noun cheval (horse) to
identify gallant knights (chevaliers) and their code of honor (chivalry). The name of game lands
near the border of Scotland and England was Chevy Chase (or Chace) to refer to hunts there by
nobles on horseback. A famous poem, “The Ballad of Chevy Chase,” centers on a storied 1388
battle at the site between Englishmen and Scots after the latter mistook an English hunting
party for an invasion force. Of course, Miniver Cheevy can also be a coinage derived from the
term minimum achiever, a label that sums up Mr. Cheevy’s meager abilities in the modern
workaday world.
Structure
The structure of “Miniver Cheevy” is neatly symmetrical, containing eight four-line
stanzas (quatrains). The first and third lines of each stanza have masculine end rhyme, and the
second and fourth lines have feminine end rhyme. Masculine rhyme occurs when the final
syllable of a line rhymes with the final syllable of another line. Feminine rhyme occurs when
the final two syllables of a line rhyme with the final two syllables of another line.
Robinson begins the first line of each stanza with Miniver and the third line of each
stanza with either he or Miniver. He also lengthens the second line of each stanza and shortens
the last line of each stanza, enabling him to present the long and the short of Miniver’s misery.
In addition, he rhetorically parallels the openings of the second, third, and fourth stanzas with
the openings of the fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas. The opening line of the eighth stanza then
rhetorically parallels the opening line of the first stanza.
Following is an illustration of this pattern:
Stanza 1, line 1: Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Stanza 8, line 1: Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Comment: Notice that lines 1 and 8 resemble each other grammatically: In each case, a
proper noun is followed by a parenthetical expression. Notice also that these are the only two
lines in the poem that begin with the first and last names of Cheevy.
Stanza 2, line 1: Miniver loved the days of old
Stanza 3, line 1: Miniver sighed for what was not
Stanza 4, line 1: Miniver mourned the ripe renown
Stanza 5, line 1: Miniver loved the Medici
Stanza 6, line 1: Miniver cursed the commonplace
Stanza 7, line 1: Miniver scorned the gold he sought
Comment: Notice the pattern: (1) Miniver loved, Miniver sighed, Miniver mourned; (2)
Miniver loved, Miniver cursed, Miniver scorned.
Miniver’s Fixation
What accounts for Miniver Cheevy’s fixation on the past?
Mr. Cheevy would tell you that he cannot abide the workaday world around him, for it is
humdrum and bourgeois, lacking the heroic spirit and aesthetic taste of ages past. Miniver
himself has the required gallantry and refinement, he would assure you, but cannot use these
qualities because he was born in the wrong century in the wrong place. If he could go back in
time—to Arthur’s Camelot, for example—what wonders he would work. Riding a horse and
wielding a sword, he would lead knights in a charge, lay siege to castles, and carry home vast
treasures. Minstrels would sing of his valor; fair maidens would swoon at his smile.
 What Miniver would not tell you, however, is the truth about his own past. Early in life,
he was a “child of scorn” (line 1) because his parents and the community in which he lived did
not accept him for what he was. Was he disfigured, awkward, peevish, incorrigible–or perhaps
illegitimate? It does not matter. What matters is that he protected himself by escaping into
books and living vicariously in their stories. He became Achilles at Troy, Alexander at Thebes,
Gawain at Camelot. Over the years, he became so fixated on his dream world that he neglected
to develop the social and vocational skills needed to cope with the real world. Consequently, he
became a misfit and ne’er-do-well. But rather than blame himself and his shortcomings for his
failures, he blamed the world around him. He was too good for it. Fate had fixed him in the
wrong century.
And so he dreamed on—and fed his dreams with drink.
E. A. Robinson as Miniver
When Robinson created Miniver, he looked inward, for—in a way—he was Miniver.
From the very beginning of his life in December 1869, Robinson’s mother frowned on him: she
wanted a girl. When a boy was born, she had no ready name for him. Not until six months
later—in the summer of 1870—did he receive an identity. The big moment came when the
Robinsons were vacationing at a resort in Harpswell, Maine.
[T]he ladies on the verandah challenged her [Mrs. Robinson] to name the baby. The
ladies placed names in a lottery, and the name drawn was “Edwin.” Because the lady who
proposed “Edwin” as a name was from Arlington, Massachusetts, baby Robinson became
Edwin Arlington Robinson, a name that was anathema to him throughout his life. He hated the
family’s habit of calling him “Win,” and as an adult he always signed himself as “E. A.” (Smith,
Danny D. “Biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson.” Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Virtual
Tour of Robinson’s Gardiner, Maine. 17 July 2008 <http://-
www.earobinson.com/pages/HisLife.html>.
In an age of industrial growth and emerging technologies, as well as entrepreneurial
derring-do and materialism, Robinson preferred writing poetry. In the 1890s, when he was in
his twenties, his brother Herman married the woman Edwin loved. Then his father died, his
family went bankrupt, his mother died, his brother Herman began drinking heavily, and in
1899 his brother Dean died after becoming addicted to Morphine. Edwin worked at various
jobs to sustain himself while writing his verses. He knew poverty. He knew failure. And, like
Miniver and his brother Herman, he turned to alcohol.
However, after his poetry gained recognition in the first decade of the twentieth
century—President Theodore Roosevelt was one of his admirers—he began succeeding as a
poet but continued to struggle financially. After Roosevelt intervened on his behalf to get him
a government job in a customs house, Robinson’s financial problems eased, and he received
favorable reviews for Town Down the Driver, the collection in which “Miniver Cheevy”
appeared. Eventually, he went on to win three Pulitzer Prizes.
Over the years, “Miniver Cheevy” came to be recognized as one of his finest poems.
“Miniver Cheevy” as Satire
In depicting Miniver Cheevy as a misfit dreamer, Robinson satirizes the Minivers of the
world who spend too much time dwelling on the “the good old days” instead of living in the
present.
But, paradoxically, he also satirizes Miniver’s financially successful contemporaries for
debasing the past. He says, for example, that Romance, a mainstay genre of many classic
literary works, is “now on the the town” (line 15). In other words, the Romance genre that once
regaled readers with wonderful tales in exquisite prose is now a down-and-outer living on the
public dole, perhaps in the form of tawdry novels in pedestrian prose that boorish parvenus
buy instead of the classics. Art—real literary art—is “a vagrant”; the powers that be in the
present world are too caught up in their enterprises and too aesthetically deficient to pay
attention to it.
Themes
Escaping Reality
Miniver Cheevy escapes the burdens of everyday life by dreaming of bygone days and
soothing himself with a bottle of liquor. It is normal, of course, to think about the past; but it is
abnormal to dwell on it constantly.
 Rationalization
Miniver rationalizes that fate is at fault for his failure, as line 31 points out. How could he be
blamed for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time?

4. Study the information on Carl Sandburg and read the selected poems.
Prepare the literary interpretation of one of the poems below (use questions in
Discussion Questions to help you).
Carl Sandburg
(1878-1967)
I believe that free men the world over cherish the earth as cradle and tomb, the
handiwork of their Maker, the possession of the family man. I believe freedom comes the hard
way by ceaseless groping, toil, struggle even by fiery trial and agony.
Quoted in Gallery of Americans, p. 42.
I glory in this world of men and women,
torn with troubles and lost in sorrow,
yet living on to love and
laugh and play through it all.
From In Reckless Ecstasy (Sandburg’s first book of poems, published in 1904)

The polar opposite of Robinson, Carl Sandburg played the part of the simple workman,
down to the cloth cap which he often wore. Nevertheless, he was an artist with words. His
language was more colloquial and his rhythms looser than Robinson’s; yet he too knew the
value of form and poetic technique. As critic Louis Untermeyer puts it, there are “two
Sandburgs: the muscular, heavy-fisted, hard-hitting son of the streets, and his al-most
unrecognizable twin, the shadow-painter, the haunter of mists, the lover of implications and
overtones.”
Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, of Swedish immigrant parents. He did odd
jobs, served in the Spanish-American War, and worked his way through nearly four years of
college after-ward. From 1910 to 1912 he acted as secretary for the first Socialist mayor of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not long afterward he attracted public notice with his increasingly
powerful poetry, especially the poem, “Chicago,” and he gradually be-came able to give most of
his time to his writing. He did some literary journalism; he wrote ballads and books for
children, and he continued with his serious poetry. And all the while, his interest in Abraham
Lincoln deepened. He had grown up in Lincoln country and perhaps he thought of himself as
a Lincolnesque figure. At any rate, he worked on the biography for years and by 1939 had
completed the six-volume life of Lincoln which he considered his masterwork. Imposing
though the Lincoln is, how-ever, his poetry promises to be more important. Of the poems
reprinted below, “The Harbor” embodies both the lyrical poet and the muscular “son of the
streets.”
It is the kind of poem that made Sandburg famous: short, powerful, organic in form. The
few lines are brief; when Sandburg comes to the end of a phrase he ends his line, and each line
ends on an important word. The power of “The Harbor” comes from two vivid contrasts. One
is between the imprisoning ugliness of the slums and the grace and freedom of the lake and the
birds flying above it. The other is the contrast between the grim message and the graceful
vocabulary employed.
This kind of poetry is called free verse, in distinction from poems such as the sonnet,
the form of which is fixed by convention. Walt Whitman was the first American poet to write
free verse, and Sandburg’s poem “I Am the People, the Mob” resembles Whitman’s work, not
only in form but in feeling the same high vision of American promise, formed not of
abstractions but of the common stuff of life. It has the long lines and repetitious sentence
structure that marked Whitman’s great “Leaves of Grass.” Sandburg’s poem, like Whitman’s,
gains power from this repetition and accumulation. The opening words are several times
repeated for emphasis and the lines or rather, the verse paragraphs build up and grow longer
until the end. Sandburg finishes the poem with a short, staccato poetic statement. The central
idea of the poem is realistically but optimistically democratic. Though the people suffer, they
will triumph.
 Such is the central idea also of the third poem by Sandburg “The People Will Live On.”
It shows Sandburg’s continued interest in poetic experimentation as well as his usual hearty
optimism about the people. Composed in 1936, it reflects the then current aspirations of the
New Deal. Not the least interesting thing about this poem is that, though a memorable piece of
verse, it is by no means flawless. Some awkwardness results from the opposition of two kinds
of language, one plain, the other ornate. An example of the first is “The learning and blundering
people will live on.” “The people is a polychrome, a spectrum and a prism, held in a moving
monolith’ is an instance of the second. This line is made awkward by Sandburg’s use of “is”
instead of “are,” which more naturally follows “people”.
Flaws and all, Carl Sandburg has been called the unofficial American poet laureate of
the 30s and 40s, and rightly so. The title is a tribute to the rhythmic strength of his poetry and
his prophetic faith:
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
A sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of tomorrows, a sky of tomorrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
Tomorrow is a day.
From “Prairie,” 1918
SELECTION I
The Harbor
by Carl Sandburg
Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12842/the-harbor
SELECTION II
I Am the People, the Mob
by Carl Sandburg
I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns.
They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass
over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death
comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—
I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and
no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no
speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or
any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45036/i-am-the-people-the-mob
 SELECTION III
The people will live on
by Carl Sandburg
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and

hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twisting to moan
with a gargoyle mouth: “They buy me and sell me
...it’s a game... sometime I’ll break loose...”

Once having marched

Over the margins of animal necessity,

Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses

and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and
food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
 The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.

The people is a polychrome,

a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux (1) of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the Labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.

The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.

Man is a long time coming.

Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people
march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, (2)
the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
______________________
1. clavilux: organ-like console keyed to colored lights instead of music.
2. for keeps: to keep, for their own.
Fog
by Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45032/fog-56d2245d7b36c
SELECTIONS I-III
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What is the main idea expressed in “The Harbor”? How does the poet achieve the
contrast he wants to emphasize?
 2. Is “I am the People, the Mob” an optimistic or a pessimistic poem? Do you think the
People eventually do learn to remember? How? Explain the meaning of the last line of the
poem.
3. What does the poet gain by repeating himself at times in “The People Will Live On”?
In your opinion, what is the hope expressed in the poem? What does the line, “This old anvil
laughs at many broken hammers,” mean?
4. Do you think Sandburg’s faith in the People is realistic? Give reasons to support your
answer.
5. How does Sandburg’s poetry differ in technique from that of Robinson?
6. “The People Will Live On” contains many pungent words. Which seem to you most
striking or allusive, and what do they suggest? How do they contribute to the meaning of the
poem?
(Carl Bode. Highlights of American Literature. Washington, D.C.:
English Language Programs Division Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
United States Information Agency, 1995. P. 163- 168)
5. Read the Study Guide on Robert Frost. Prepare a gist of no more than 300
words focusing on the characteristic features Frost’s poetry. Read the
poems in Selections I – V, select one poem for literary analysis. Use the
questions in Discussion Sections after each selection.
Robert Frost
(1874-1963)
A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of
wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best
when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn’t find it and
comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around
with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. That’s why it oftener comes
to nothing in youth before experience has filled the mind with thoughts. It may be a big
emotion then and yet finds nothing it can embody in. If finds the thought and the thought
finds the words. Let's say again: A poem particularly must not begin thought first.
From Frost’s letter to Louis Untermeyer written on January1, 1916

As poets go, Frost (1874-1963) was no longer young when he published his first book of
poems, A Boy’s Will, in 1913. Though born in San Francisco, he came of a New England family
which returned to New England when he was ten. Like many other writers, he had a brief brush
with college and then supported himself by various means, ranging from shoe-making to
editing a country newspaper. However, he had been brought up on a farm and he liked farming.
Most of all, he liked to write but he could not support himself by writing. He was in his late 30s
when he moved to England, where he issued his first book and found an appreciation for his
work he had not found in America.
At the outbreak of World War I, Frost went back to farming in New Hampshire.
Thereafter, although he made many journeys and frequent visits elsewhere, he considered the
farm his home and its activities remained the focus of his poetry.
Frost’s verses became part of a great tradition, shaped by the Roman poet Vergil, of what
is called bucolic poetry – poetry about farming. However, though he used farm situations in
much of his poetry, he gave them a wide application. He might write about stepping on a rake
and describe the feeling when it hit him, but he used the incident to show how life gives us
bruises.
Some talents in poetry are used up early, but not Frost’s. He continued to publish fine
poetry for fifty years. He reached the height of his popularity after World War II. If America of
the 20th century had a national poet, it was Frost. He was chosen to read one of his poems at
the inauguration of the late President John F. Kennedy, the first poet ever so honored.
Because Frost wrote so well for so long, it is hard to select poems to reprint. Here,
however, are two favorites among readers, “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken,” plus
three short, lesser known poems.
 “Mending Wall” shows Frost at work with a neighbor, helping to repair a stonewall that
separates their two farms. Frost dislikes walls; his neighbor likes them. We soon see that the
walls Frost is talking about are all the things that separate one human being from another, all
the things in life that keeps us from loving our fellowman. Yet Frost never makes a sermon of
his poem. He teaches the brotherhood of man, but not tediously. What keeps the poem from
being pious is, first, Frost’s whimsical humor and, second, the easy in-formality of his lines.
The poem is written in what is termed blank verse. It has five beats to a line, and the beat comes
on every second syllable. Also, the lines do not rhyme. But Frost takes the blank-verse form,
shakes it up, loosens it, and makes it sound almost like everyday conversation. The point is,
however, that it turns out to be a wise and beautiful conversation.
“The Road Not Taken” is set in some woods but the place where it occurs is really
anywhere and any time. It is, so to speak, the land of “Might Have Been.” We must make a
decision. We must decide which way to go. This universal dilemma Frost turns into poetry of
gentle yet strong understanding. Here there is nothing local or folksy in the words he uses. His
message is worldwide. He also has fewer of his personal, colloquial rhythms in these lines than
in “Mending Wall,” and the form of the poem is one of stanzas, each regular in its arrangement
of rhymes.
“Fire and Ice,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “Design” seem at first reading to be
lucidly simple, yet after better acquaintance they turn out to be rich in hid-den meanings. There
is a certain reticence, a teasing indirectness, in Frost’s way of telling his thought, evident in
these three short poems. He often leaves the reader to search for any implied significance and
frequently implies a more general meaning to his moral than he seems to state. He appears not
to commit himself to any solution which runs the danger of being too simple. On one occasion
he said: “I prefer the synecdoche in poetry that figure of speech in which we use a part for the
whole.” Life, as Frost saw it, is full of apparent paradoxes. It is tragic and hilariously comic,
beautiful and ugly, chaotic and unified, and he refused to take an either/or position, as we will
see in such poems as “Fire and Ice” and “Design.”
Carl Bode. Highlights of American Literature. Washington, D.C.:
English Language Programs Division Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
United States Information Agency, 1995. P. 214 – 215.
Like Robinson, Robert Frost was drawn towards traditional forms. ‘I had as soon write
free verse’, he once declared, ‘as play tennis without a net.’ For him, traditional metres were a
necessary discipline, something against which he could play off the urgencies of his own
speaking voice, the chance movements of his emotions, the catch and tilt of his breath. Like
Robinson, too, Frost acquired fame but never shed what he referred to as his ‘daily gloominess’.
His first volume of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1912), was published in England, where he lived for a
while and became acquainted with both Ezra Pound, who helped Frost to get his work in
Poetry, and the ‘Georgian’ group of poets that included Edward Thomas.
North of Boston (1914), his second collection, became a best-seller; Mountain Interval
(1916), the third collection, attracted national attention; and his Collected Poems (1930) won
national prizes. By 1955, he had so many honorary degrees that he could have his doctoral
hoods sewn together to make a quilt for his bed. And by the 1960s, he was sufficiently famous
to be invited to read a poem at the inauguration of President Kennedy and to represent the
United States on a goodwill mission to Russia. Yet Frost, through all this, was haunted by
personal misfortune. Two children died in infancy, a son committed suicide, and one of his
daughters was committed to a mental institution. And not just at moments of crisis such as
these, Frost sprinkled his journals with remarks such as: ‘one of the hardest disciplines is
having to learn the meaningless’, or, more simply, ‘nature is chaos’.
‘I’ve wanted to write down certain brute throat noises’, Frost said, ‘so that no one could
miss them in my sentences.’ Those noises, he felt, acquired additional pungency and point from
being placed in tension with established rhythms and rhymes: what he was after, in effect, was
a creative tension between musicality and the cadences of everyday conversation, a casual but
crafty play of speech and song.
That play, as it emerges in his poems, is not just a matter of voice, however, but of vision.
By means of it, he explores the paradox implicit in one of his most famous lines: ‘The fact is the
sweetest dream that labour knows.’ ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ illustrates this.
Its opening stanza establishes the ambivalent tone of the poem and the imaginative tension
that constitutes its debate:
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.
The duality of the narrator’s response to the woods is caught in the contrast between the
relaxed, conversational idiom of the first three lines and the dreamlike descriptive detail and
hypnotic verbal music of the last. Clearing and wilderness, law and freedom, civilization and
nature, fact and dream: these oppositions reverberate throughout American writing. And they
are registered here in Frost’s own quietly ironic contrast between the road along which the
narrator travels, connecting marketplace to marketplace, promoting community and culture,
and the white silence of the woods, where none of the ordinary limitations of the world seems
to apply. In a minor key, they are caught also in the implicit comparison between the owner of
these woods, who apparently regards them purely as a financial investment (he lives in the
village), and the narrator who sees them, at least potentially, as a spiritual one.
This contrast between what might be termed, rather reductively perhaps, ‘realistic’ and
‘romantic’ attitudes is then sustained through the next two stanzas: the commonsensical
response is now playfully attributed to the narrator’s horse which, like any practical being,
wants to get on down the road to food and shelter. The narrator himself, however, continues to
be lured by the mysteries of the forest just as the Romantic poets were lured by the mysteries
of otherness, sleep and death. And, as before, the contrast is a product of tone and texture as
much as dramatic intimation: the poem communicates its debate in how it says things as much
as in what it says. So, the harsh gutturals and abrupt movement of lines like ‘He gives his
harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake’ give verbal shape to the matter-of-fact
attitude attributed to the horse, just as the soothing sibilants and gently rocking motion of the
lines that follow this (‘The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake’) offer
a tonal equivalent of the strange, seductive world into which the narrator is tempted to move.
‘Everything that is written’, Frost once said, ‘is as good as it is dramatic’; and in a poem like this
the words of the poem become actors in the drama.
The final stanza of ‘Stopping by Woods’ does not resolve its tensions; on the contrary, it
rehearses them in particularly memorable language.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Having paid tribute to the dangerous seductiveness of the woods, the narrator seems to
be trying to shake himself back into commonsense reality by invoking his ‘promises’ or
mundane responsibilities. The last line is repeated, however; and while at first it seems little
more than a literal reference to the journey he has to complete (and so a way of telling himself
to continue on down the road), the repetition gives it particular resonance. This could, after all,
be a metaphorical reference to the brief span of human life and the compulsion this puts the
narrator under to take risks and explore the truth while he can. Only a few ‘miles’ to go before
‘I sleep’ in death: such a chilling memento mori perhaps justifies stopping by the woods in the
first place and considering the spiritual quest implicit in the vision they offer. Perhaps: the
point is that neither narrator nor reader can be sure.
‘The poem is the act of having the thought,’ Frost insisted; it is process rather than
product, it invites us to share in the experiences of seeing, feeling and thinking, not simply to
look at their results. So the most a piece like ‘Stopping by Woods’ will offer – and it is a great
deal – is an imaginative resolution of its tensions: the sense that its conflicts and irresolutions
have been given appropriate dramatic expression, revelation and equipoise.
‘It begins in delight and ends in wisdom,’ said Frost in his remarkable definition of ‘the
figure a poem makes’: The figure is the same for love . . . It begins in delight, assumes direction
with the first line laid, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in clarification of life – not
necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary
stay against confusion.
 The incessant coupling of opposites, the felicitous, serious play that ends in ‘a
momentary stay against confusion’, is precisely what characterizes Frost’s work. It makes all
his best lyrics, like ‘Stopping by Woods’, essentially dramatic in that they enact internal
conflicts, savage dualisms of thought and feeling. In turn, it makes all of his best dramatic
poems, like ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ and ‘West-Running Brook’, essentially lyrical in that
they reproduce, in beautifully individualized form, those same conflicts, turning them into
intimate human communication. In ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, for example, the event that
gives the poem its title is merely the occasion for a loving argument between husband and wife
that brings out their differences of speech and approach. The husband’s voice is abrupt, with
many stops and few connectives, full of imperatives and willful declarations, turning aside for
brusque rhetorical or cross-examining questions. The seal of his tone is set by his caustic
description of home: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take
you in.’ His character, clearly, is that of the maker of good bargains, the shrewd calculator of
motives, the uncompromising champion of harsh truth. The wife is very different, as her
definition of home suggests: ‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to
deserve.’ Far more hesitant, her speech has breaks of another kind from her husband’s: of
someone reaching for the right word, more sympathetic and imaginative, using emotion and a
kind of lyric responsiveness to soften the hard edges of fact. Very different in character, and in
their reactions to the hired man who returns to them after a long absence looking for work,
they are nevertheless in intimate touch with each other; and they are drawn even closer
together by the hired man’s sudden death. They never entirely agree; their differences are no
more resolved than the differences in ‘Stopping by Woods’ are. But, like ‘Stopping by Woods’,
they suggest the possible coexistence of these differences, a marriage or, to use Frost’s own
phrase, ‘happy-sad blend’ of realism and romance.
Another, simpler way of describing the circuitous, serpentine character of Frost’s work
is to say that he is the supreme example of the sceptic in modern American poetry: the person
who mistrusts categorical answers, utopian solutions, and who, for reasons he thoroughly
articulates, cannot or will not make up his mind. In ‘For Once, Then, Something’, for instance,
he plays on the traditional idea of looking down into a well in search of the truth. The narrator,
we are told, once peered into the subterranean darkness and, for a moment, saw ‘a something
white, uncertain’: but then a ripple in the water ‘Blurred it, blotted it out’. ‘What was that
whiteness?’ the narrator asks himself, and can find an answer only in his own indecision:
‘Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.’ ‘Something’ might be everything or
nothing. Having wound, in slow, meditative hendecasyllabics, through the mysteries of
exploration, the poem ends in a series of questions that only underline the difficulties of
knowing. A comparison with an earlier New England poet, Emily Dickinson, is relevant here,
for in ‘What mystery pervades a well!’ Dickinson pursues exactly the same theme. Dickinson,
however, concludes that ‘nature is a stranger yet’: she is at least sure that she has seen nothing,
or at least very little, and so measured the dimensions of what she called her ‘magic prison’.
For Frost, even this radically limited degree of certainty is impossible. He cannot gauge the size
or nature of his cell; he cannot be certain whether the ‘something’ he has seen is trivial or
significant.
Dickinson at least knows that she cannot know: Frost, by comparison, cannot know even
this. The limits to perception, the nature and scope of knowing and naming, the accessibility of
truth: all these things remain hidden from him, and so he falls back on the ultimate weapon of
the impotent and irresolute, irony.
Irony is by no means Frost’s only weapon, though. As his autobiographical poem, ‘The
Oven Bird’ makes clear, he is a poet struggling to find ‘what to make of a diminished thing’.
Transcendence is not available for him in the way it was for earlier writers like Emerson and
Whitman. Consequently, he must do what he can with what has been called ‘a minimal case’.
This sometimes involves ironic meditations on the human pursuit of knowledge, as it does in
‘For Once, Then, Something’ or ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’. But just as often it precipitates
tentative inquiry into the mysteries that hover on the edges of experience, the possible sources
of fear and wonder. The more unnerving results of such an inquiry emerge in poems like ‘Out,
Out –’ and ‘Design’. ‘Out, Out –’ begins with what seems like a gently nostalgic piece of rural
portrait-painting:
 The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it . . .
From this, the poet moves slowly, in an almost relaxed fashion, into an account of an
apparently minor accident: we are told, in quietly serio-comic terms, how one of the workers,
a young boy, cut his hand on the buzz saw. Things grow more serious when the possibility
emerges that the boy might lose his hand. Just the same, we are hardly prepared for the final
lines:
And then – the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
This is death stripped of any sense of occasion, denied preparation or ceremony.
Unanticipated, greeted with incomprehension, stilted phrases and awkward reactions, and
followed by numbness, together with the indelible feeling that the dead are gone while the living
must continue, this is death as the terrifying, universal and in some sense inconsequential fact
that it is – and as very few writers have been willing to acknowledge it.
Fear and dread lurk close to the surface of a poem like this, certainly: but, in other
poems, Frost’s playfulness, his willingness to entertain all kinds of doubts and possibilities,
leads him in the contrary direction – not to transcendence of facts, perhaps, but to a wondering,
joyful apprehension of their potential, to the sense that nature might after all be whispering
secret, sympathetic messages to us.
‘The Most of It’ belongs in this second group. It presents us with a situation familiar
enough in Romantic literature, and one that American writers like Cooper, Emerson and
Whitman were particularly fond of exploring: the protagonist – the ‘he’ of the poem – stands
looking across a lake towards some distant hills, seeking comfort and instruction from nature.
In accordance with the tradition, Frost’s protagonist cries out to the hills, seeking what the poet
calls ‘counter-love, original response’: some sign that nature sympathizes and that he has not
‘kept the universe alone’. But, in this case at least, there is no clear reaction. All he seems to get
back is the ‘mocking echo’ of his own voice, confirming him in his isolation. Or does he? This,
after all, is the concluding description of the echo:
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall.
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbush – and that was all.
If a symbol is, in Jung’s phrase, ‘the best possible expression of a relatively unknown
fact’, then this is the purest of symbols. Perhaps all the protagonist apprehends is the echo of
his voice. However, that echo is described with such dramatic bite, such vitality, that perhaps
he apprehends more: perhaps he has glimpsed, if not the Emersonian Over-Soul, then at least
some of the strange, animistic forces that give life dimension and energy, that transform ‘fact’
into ‘dream’. He, and we, cannot be sure, and it is the achievement of the poem that we cannot
be: that we are left, in short, with a feeling of mystery.
(Gray, Richard J. A History of American Literature. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004. P. 373 – 388)
SELECTION I
Mending Wall
by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
_______________________
1. was like to: might; was likely to.
2. old-stone savage: man of the Old Stone Age.
SELECTION II
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
 And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
SELECTIONS I & II
Mending Wall
1. What do you think the theme of the poem is?
2. Why do you think the poet refers to the mending of the wall as “just another kind of
outdoor game”?
3. How does the speaker’s attitude toward mending the wall compare with that of his
neighbor?
4. In lines 40-45, what kind of darkness surrounds the neighbor?
5. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” What do you think it is?
6. In your opinion, does Frost think that following tradition is always a good thing? Quote
lines from the poem to support your answer. Do you think following tradition is a good
thing?
7. How can the barrier between individuals be broken down? the barrier between peoples
of different nations?
8. What gives the poem a conversational tone?
9. Discuss the symbolic meaning of the wall in this poem.
The Road Not Taken
1. What human traits are suggested by the first stanza of the poem?
2. What is the theme of the poem?
3. In what way does the poem suggest that Frost was a non-conformist?
4. Do you think the line, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way” is fatalistic in tone?
Explain your answer.
SELECTION III
Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice
SELECTION IV
Acquainted with the Night
by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47548/acquainted-with-the-night

SELECTION V
Design
by Robert Frost
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
https://poets.org/poem/design
_________________________
1. heal-all: a kind of wild flower.
SELECTIONS III, IV and V
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Fire and Ice
1. What is the complex idea which is expressed in a few words in this poem?
2. Explain the associations that the poet uses for fire and ice.
3. What are your own thoughts on the end of the world?
Acquainted with the Night
1. What does the poet mean when he says “he has been one acquainted with the night”?
2. What images does the poet use to project the idea of loneliness or rejection?
3. What picture is conveyed by lines 7-10?
4. What is the luminary clock referred to in line 12? Why was the time neither wrong nor
right?
Design
1. The heal-all was once supposed to have healing qualities, hence its name. Of what
significance is the fact that the spider, the heal-all, and the moth are all white?
2. Is it significant that the spider is “dimpled” and “fat” and like a “snow-drop,” and that
the flower is “innocent” and named “heal-all”? Give your reasons.
3. What question does the poem pose about the existence of God? What twist does Frost
give in answer to this question?