Robert Frost Modern Poetry

It has been pointed out that his poetry has a disarming simplicity while modern poetry is characterised by complexity and intricacy. In his poetry, we do not find irregular verse-forms, fragmentary sentences, learned illusions and references, ironic contracts, and erudite symbolism, to all of which we are used and which he regarded as the hall-mark of modernity.
Schneider writes, that one of the most serious limitation of Frost’s poetry is that he is out of tune with modern age and all its problems. We may go, therefore, to his poetry for diversion and relief, but not for illumination. Mr. Frost does not understand our time and will make no effort to understand it. When he essays to speak of it, as in the long poem New Hampshire, he shows a surprising lack of comprehension.
Yvor Winters analyses such poems as The Bear to show that Frost admires man as a creature of impulse and instinct, and ridicules the idea of man as a reasoning creature, and this is in marked opposition to modern thought. He has his affinities with the great 19th century romantics rather than with the great moderns.
But some critics have shown that Frost is essentially a modern poet, and that the surface simplicity of his poetry is deceptive and misleading. In reality, he is a very complex and intricate poet, and this complexity arises from his extensive use of symbols. He himself tells us in his article The Figure a Poem Makes, “he is by intension a symbolist who takes his symbols from the public