ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in Vol.02, Issue 10, October 2017, ISSN -2456-1037 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) UGC APPROVED NO. 48767
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ROBERT FROST’S POETIC STYL Dr. Manoj Kumar Singh
(Assistant Professor), S.M.R.D.P.G. College Bhurkura, Ghazipur, UP, India Robert frost‟s poetic art should rightly be
regarded as an artifice. It is in every sense obtrusive and well-studied. It contains sound of sense and sound of meaning.
His poetic art contrives relationship between dramatic intonation and „accent of sense‟: It contains, brute throat voice‟
and tone of voice. Sometimes he writes sentences that smell merenotations. He has been acknowledged as one of the renewers of the speaking language of modern poetry. He regards metre, dramatic sense and traditional ordering of stresses as essential factors for good poetry. He has very contempt for dead language and dictionary- words.
Dictionary – words and dead language cannot convey the tones of meaning. It is mainly to archive dramatic and rhythmic effect that he employs the speech of his locality. He is the master of native speech and achieves the accent of sense in it in a higher degree. Through his attainments in language, he is able to meet the demands of syntax, drama and metre. He fills his iambic with colloquial colour and the flow of his native speech. “Birches, “Mending Wall” “West Running Brook” are for example the poems which reveal the poet in a colloquial but realistic language and dialectical terms. They scrupulously avoid the poetical diction and artificial rhetoric devices. The poet can be seen in these poems efficiently revelling in the familiar and spoken language of new Englanders.
Auden recognized Frost‟s music as “ always that of the speaking voice, quiet and sensible.,” Though he called Frost‟s style” Good Drab”, Auden found that he managed to make “ this simple kind of speech express a wide variety of emotion and experience.” Frost he said, had
“auditorychastity.” Frost was the first to acknowledge his limitations. When a well- wisher, a minister, found his poems after
“ My Butterfly” sounding” too much like talk,” Frost determined to make his deficiency a virtue and raise colloquial speech to the level of poetry, going down to a level of everyday speech he said, that even Wordsworth kept above. Like his own Oven Bird, he knew “in singing not to sing” and” what to make of diminished thing. He sought what Eloit meant by “the
music latent in the common speech of its time.
As a boy Frost had been acutely sensitive to sound. In 1894, While teaching “orthography” [his word for it] in a district school, he wrote the editor who had accepted his first poem that he had been” lying around consciously sleeping or unconsciously waking and in both the cases irresponsibly irritable [sic] to the last degree. It is due to my nerves,” he said,” they are susceptible to sound.“For Frost the beginning of literary form was
“in some turn given to the sentence in folk speech. Art,” he maintained,” is the amplification and sophistication of the proverbial turns of speech.” It was never right to call Frost a New England dialect poet. His aim, he said, was never” to keep to any special speech unliterary, vernacular, or slang. What I have been after from the first consciously, is tones of voice,”His sounds were not dialect he said, just accent.
His preoccupation with the material and the quest for essential, produce an imagery which is at once sensual and ethereal, giving unmistakable cast to his poetry. The imagery used by the poet proceeds from his peculiar manner of viewing life. In part, it is a product of his preoccupation with the material universe.
Simultaneously, it is an attempt to present the essence, not the external appearance of the world which surrounds him.
Speaking about his love for symbols the poet asserts,” I am a mystic I believe in symbols. I believe in change and changing symbols. Yet that does not take me away from the kindly contact of human beings nor, it brings me closer to them”
Another chief characteristic of Frost‟s poetry lies in its expressiveness. Like chaser‟s poetry which catches the tone of people‟s talk, Frost also is rich in expressiveness. Expressiveness in Frost‟s poetry results from the over- all- meaningof the text. His entire corpus suggests expressiveness wherever we read him. By way of illustration, we may just cite two lines, one from” Mending Wall”
and the other from “Birches”.
ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in Vol.02, Issue 10, October 2017, ISSN -2456-1037 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) UGC APPROVED NO. 48767
2 Something there is that does not love a wall.
And, Earth is the right place for love.
Frost‟s poetry is acknowledged and adjudged as new poetry not because it adopts newer and freer forms but because of its freshness of thoughts and freshness of approach toward life. His entire corpus claims much attention as it serves for an exemplar of its type. He revised his poems again and again. His poems are a rich treasure and veritable storehouse of zest, invigoration and sparkle of life. They have the uplifting and invigorating capacity of
tonic. The following lines speak better for themselves:
In winter in the woods alone Against the trees I go, I make a maple for my own And lay the maple law.
At four O‟clockI shoulder axe And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks Across the tinted snow
I see for nature no defeat In one tree‟s overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow.
