frosts early poems :: essays research papers

To refer to a group of frosts poems as " primeval" is peradventure problematic One is tempted to think of the term as coition given that ices first book of poetry appe bed when he was al sound outy 39. Moreover, Frosts plan of withholding poems from publication for long periods of time makes dating his get to difficult. galore(postnominal) of the poems of the first book, A Boys Will, were, in fact, compose long before--a few more than than a decade earlier. Likewise, Frosts later books contain poems almost certainly written in the period discussed in this note. The "Early Poems" considered here are a selection of well known verses published in the eleven geezerhood (1913-1923) spanned by Frosts first four books A Boys Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, and mod Hampshire.Frost famously likened the composition of free-verse poetry to playing tennis without a net it might be fun, but it "aint tennis." You will find still tennis in the poems tha t follow. And yet, even while Frost worked within stool, he excessively worked the form itself, shaping it by his choice of language and his exercise of variation. He invented forms, too, when the poem required it. A theme in Frosts work is the need for some, but not total, freedom--for boundaries, too, can be liberating for the poet, and Frost perhaps knew this better than any ane No American poet has wrought such memorable, personally identifiable, idiosyncratic poetry from such self-imposed, often traditional formulae. In these "early" years, Frost was concerned with perfecting what he termed "the sound of whiz." This was "the abstract vitality of our speech...pure sound-- pure form" a rendering, in words, of raw sensory perception. The words, the form of the words, and the sounds they encode are as much the subject of the poem as the subject is. Frost once wrote in a letter that to be a poet, one must "learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre." Thus, we read "Mowing" and simultaneously hear the swishing and whispering of the scythe upon reading "Stopping by the Woods," one clearly hears the sweep of easy wind and downy rubbish to read "Birches" is to vividly sense the breezy stir that cracks and crazes the trees enamel. Most of the lyrics inured in this note are relatively short, but Frost also pioneered the long dramatic lyric (represented here by "Home entombment").