Robert Frost Pastoral Poetry Essay

CHAPTER-I

INTRODUCTION

Robert Frost’s poetry has been so extensively analysed that it

would not be easily possible to think of something altogether novel to

say. A humble attempt has been made in the following pages to observe

the elements of pastoral in the poetry of Frost from a new point of view.

He is largely a poet of much wider sympathies than those of a mere

regional poet. Frost’s range of pastoral is not limited only up to the

natural aspects but it can be best seen in every aspect. The poetry he has

written is of a kind distinctly different from that of his major

contemporaries. His work has a simplicity so strong that it is hard to place

Frost in the present century, therefore, tempted to assume that he is a

belated Victorian writer in a familiar manner.

His poetry is written mostly in traditional verse

form. During his time, he did not flow the poetic movements &

fashionism but continued to write the way he always had. He is best

known for poems such as The Road Not Taken, My Butterfly, and

many more. His poetry is not directed to one specific age group.

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

2

the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science

and Technology. However, he was a contemporary and friend to such

modernist greats as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. But as a modern

poet Frost is different from other modern poets. While modernist poetry

is sometimes associated with an elitist culture that takes poetry away

from the general public through experimental forms and esoteric

references, Frost’s is a modem poet in his rural, working-class