Robert Frost as a modern poet

In spite of the Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the awareness of the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science and Technology.
Critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. 

In fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillusionment of the modern man in symbolical and metaphysical terms as much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, regrets and disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “An old Man’s Winter Night”, the old man is lonely, completely alienated from the society, likeness, the tiredness of the farmer due to over work in “Apple-Picking” and as a result of it his yielding to sleep:

For I have too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of great harvest I myself desired

His metaphysical treatment of the subject in some of his poems is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:

Good fences make good neighbour

and the modern radical farmer says:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

 According to J.F.Lynen the use of the pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life. He argues that it provides him with a point of view.

Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle. His pastoralism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.

Another poetic technique adopted by Frost which makes him a modern poet is symbolism. “The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from one another mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbors in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.

Unlike Romantics he has taken notice of both the bright and dark aspects of nature as we see in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking turmoil and storms:

Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath.

 In fact the world of nature in Frost’s poetry is not a world of dream. It is much more harsh, horrible and hostile than the modern urban world. Hence his experience of the pastoral technique to comment on the human issue of modern world his realistic treatment of Nature, his employment of symbolic and metaphysical techniques and the projection of the awareness of human problems of the modern society in his poetry justly entitle him to be looked up to as modern poet.

 Frost has used a method of indirection as used by modern poets like T. S. Eliot and others. In “The Waste Land” Eliot juxtaposes the present and the past. The past here is definitely meant to reveal and interpret the present. Likewise, in Frost’s poetry, the rural and the urban are juxtaposed – the rural serving as a standard for and comment on the urban. The metaphoric poem, “Mending Wall” shows the necessity of walls, of clear demarcations of property is emphasised, implicitly criticising the craze for breaking down walls and imposing brotherhood.

            Frost has an affinity with the modern poets in style and symbolic technique. “Fire and Ice” is a symbolic poem. The speaker of the poem is dwelling on the two theories for the end of the world. Some contend that the world will perish in fire symbolising passion, some ice symbolic of hatred. But the speaker favours passion and upon second thought; he adds that hatred is powerful enough to destroy the world. They both are capable of destroying the world. The underlying symbolic meaning is that the intensity of man’s passions, which makes him human, creates the inhuman forces of disaster. The speaker says:

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.”

            Like many other modern poets, Frost deals with the tension and problems of modern people. Just as in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, the protagonist is suffering from indecision to propose the woman he loves, so in “Road Not Taken” by Frost, the speaker hesitates to choose one of the two roads. But here he becomes successful in electing one of them after a long period of hesitation. The speaker’s hesitant mind is expressed:

“And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could”

            Frost’s poetry gives evidence that he believes in some kind of god, and that he adheres to a strict sense of values, but that his beliefs are not those of the traditional Christian. He rejects the acceptable idea of heaven. In “After Apple Picking” he suggests that man’s life after death is akin to the hibernation of an animal. He also rejects the rigid orthodoxy which he sees in most religions. So there is not denying of the fact that such an approach to religion is modern.


            To sum up the analysis, it is apparent that if we consider all the aspects and examine all the important poems we will definitely come to the conclusion that Robert Frost is a genuine modern poet because his poems deal with most of the subject matters a modern poem contains.