Robert Frost Regional Art Analysis

Regional art is an art, which deals with the physical features, people, life, customs, habits, manners, traditions, language, etc., of some particular locality. However, this does not mean that regionalism is mere factual reporting or photographic reproduction. The regional artist emphasizes the unique features of a particular locality, its uniqueness, the various ways in which it differs from other localities. But as in all other art, so also in regional art, there is a constant selection and ordering of material. In other words, regional art is also creative. Through proper selection and ordering of his material the artist stresses the distinctive spirit of his chosen region and shows, further, that life in its essentials is the same everywhere. The differences are used as a means of revealing similarities, from the particular and the local, the artist arises to the general and the universal. The selected region becomes a symbol of the world at large, a microcosm which reflects the great world beyond. Frost is a regional poet in this creative sense.

When he arrived in England on September 1912 he had not thought of himself as a Yankee farmer poet. It mattered little where the “aberrant” poet went. When his soul needed to “go apart by itself”, he was not partial certainly not attached, to any special “Location”. From Frost’s point of view in 1912, New England had only been a setting for his sentimental education. Consequently, the product of this period, ‘A Boys Will’, lack the regional concern that characterizes the work of leading New England authors like Jewett, Robinson, Stowe, and Whittier. Even Longfellow’s nostalgic poem, ‘My Lost Youth’___ Frost sources for the title of A Boy’s will ___ give much more attention to an identifiably regional setting [Port-land Maine] than does Frost’s