ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ROBERT FROST

Annotated Bibliography Robert Frost



Annotated Bibliography Robert Frost

Phillips, Siobhan. “The Daily Living of Robert Frost.” PMLA 123. 3 (2008): 598-613.

Discusses the “quotidian repetition,” or, the “recursive progress” of “ordinary living” as the central theme in Frost's poetics. Brief analysis of HB in comparison to “In the Home Stretch.” According to Philips, Amy's grief is “static and perpetual” while the Husband believes grief can be finished and left behind, and both cannot find the alternative that “grief and living could intermingle” in the Freudian concept of mourning as diurnal. Also describes how the recurring periods and mute dashes at the end of lines illustrates the couple's “failure of conversation” synonymous to their “failure of progress.” Freeman, Margaret H. “The Fall of the Wall between Literary Studies and Linguistics: Cognitive Poetics.” Ed. and introd. Kristiansen, Gitte, et al. Cognitive Linguistics Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006: 403-28.

A cognitive reading of MW. Freeman argues the poem speaks of “the value of opening up the imagination.” The poem is a physical and imaginative story concerned with the human mind, mapping the boundaries found in the readers own experience on to the narrative.

Davis, Matthew. “The Laconic Response: Spartan and Athenian Mindsets in Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall.'” Literary Imagination 7.3 (2005): 289-305.

Knowing Frost was well taught in classics, Davis argues the neighbor in MW embodies Spartan ideals and the speaker Athenian ideals. The familiar line of MW, “Good fences make good neighbors,” embody Spartan (Laconic) modes of thought: brevity, reliance on ancestral wisdom, and finality stemming from deliberate pride in maintaining a prephilosophical state of mind. On the other hand, the speakers act of questioning resembles Socrates in his Platonic dialogues. According to Davis, Frost is closer to the Athenian, philosophic speaker.

Phelan, James. “Rhetorical Literary Ethics and Lyric Narratives: Robert Frost's 'Home Burial.'” Poetics Today 25.4 (2004): 627-51.

A reading of HB in the context of “rhetorical literary ethics,” James attempts to “develop further a rhetorical approach to ethics” similar to Booth's and Nussbaum's ethical criticism, but seeks to further strengthen the tie between ethics and poetic technique / form, and “be more open to the range of ethical experiences” that literary texts can offer. According to James, the most essential choice Frost makes in this poem is that he does not judge the responses by both husband and wife as either good, bad, or greater in value. This choice is relevant because it shows that “although they do mistreat and misjudge each other, those moments are a result not of their fundamental ethical deficiencies but of the sharp

Matterson, Stephen. “'To Make It Mean Me': Narrative Design in North of Boston.” Rebound: The American Poetry Book. Ed. Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson. New York: Rodopi, 2004. 45-55.

Contrary to critical trend, Matterson focuses on the comprehensive design of NB rather than the individual poems. Using the analogy of “short-story cycle,” Matterson depicts a “thematic movement in NB, in which there is a descent to solipsism and silence and then ...