Reference no: EM133252389
Robert Frost
Frost was, and continues to be, a beloved poet for many Americans. His reputation as the folksy author of "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," however, belies the philosophical contributions his poetry offers to the central modernist theme and have us asking: How do we confront a world in which reality is subject to agreement or lacks referentiality altogether? How do we express the experience of fragmentation in personal and political life? How do we live with the increasing awareness of our own mortality-whether we face the prospect of human death (as the speaker does in "Home Burial," "After Apple-Picking," and " 'Out, Out-' "), the death or absence of God (as Frost considers in "Desert Places" and "Design"), or mere disappointment at our own powerlessness (as in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening")?
In "The Figure a Poem Makes," Frost defines the act of writing poetry as "not necessarily a great clarification" but at least "a momentary stay against confusion." Frost emphasizes, though, that he wants to be just as surprised by the poem as is the reader. And his description of the thought process that a poem records applies to our own endeavors in the classroom as well. Frost contrasts scholars, who get their knowledge "with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic," with poets, who get theirs "cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books," and most students prefer to identify with the poets. Frost might, indeed, be describing an American epistemology, as it works best with students: "They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields."
"Readers who took Frost's persona at face value, along with his settings as typically American, accepted the nostalgic myth that rural New England was the heart of America" (NAAL 241). Frost enjoyed working in this vein, and made it so that his folksy poetry served as a "canny reply to high modernism's fondness for obscurity and difficulty" (NAAL 241). But Frost found darkness in the New England countryside as well, leading to profound meditations on mortality, atheism/agnosticism, and human powerlessness.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" are two of Frost's most famous poems, and many people read them for their quaint depictions of the New England countryside. A closer look at these poems, however, reveals that they depict human beings in settings that challenge their notions of power and free will. Human mortality is a theme that Frost returns to over and over again: how we confront it; how we accept it; how we avoid it; and how it gives meaning to our lives. Some of Frost's poems articulate the agnostic/atheistic attitude of twentieth-century intellectuals attempting to reconcile the horrors of world war and the innovations of contemporary science with traditional religious belief.
- How does Frost embody both American Dream and American nightmare?
Susan Glaspell, "Trifles"
Encountered alone, this dramatized version of Glaspell's famous short story "A Jury of Her Peers" may seem like an ordinary script for a TV detective drama. And time and subsequent imitation of Glaspell have not been kind to the play's gothic atmosphere. As social observation, however, the play regains interest if it is situated with other imaginative literature about the crisis facing countless women through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a crisis of isolation, of thwarted creativity, of marriages founded on a lack of understanding or love. Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," Chopin's The Awakening, Frost's "Home Burial," Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio stories-if some of these are opened along with Trifles, you will be encouraged to see the predicament of these women as a recurring important theme rather than an excuse for a mild dark drama. Then they can think about modern analogues-novels by Stephen King, films by Hitchcock and his many imitators, rural-nightmare shows on network television.
- How good a fit is the genre of the thriller/murder mystery to feminist subject matter? Is Glaspell trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or has she identified the perfect medium for her message?
Modernist Manifestos
"The word manifesto, derived from Latin and meaning 'to make public,' first entered English usage in the seventeenth century to describe printed declarations of belief and advocacy. Early manifestoes tended to be weapons forged by dissenting groups in religious and political struggles, a tradition that continued into the nineteenth century" (NAAL 315).
One of the most immediately noticeable features of Mina Loy's manifesto is its typography: She increases the font size at strategic moments, underlines text, puts letters in boldface, and employs irregular capitalization.
3. What is the effect of this? Does Loy's message of "Absolute Demolition" (rather than mere "Reform") require that she radically alter the appearance of her text? That is, does the message of her text determine the form that it takes?