COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Compare and Contrast between Wood-Pile and Spring and All



Compare and Contrast between Wood-Pile and Spring and All

Introduction

Like many of the poems in Robert Frost's 1914 collection, "The Wood-Pile" is set in winter and deals with the narration of a mind as it goes through the process of decision and indecision. Frost sees that the processes of the mind are a binary system where even the slightest choice or determination is weighed and balanced while, William's professing himself a writer addressed “to the imagination, Williams stresses an art of immediacy and vitality, a distinctly “NEW” of American poetry, one not concerned with “crude symbolism” and “strained associations.

Discussion

In some respects, "The Wood-Pile" is a "stream-of-consciousness" narrative. In such a story, the structural intent of the descriptions is to portray the way in which thoughts are connected and to show a mind at work. In the case of this poem, the symbolism or nature is not carried through physical action but through the mental dynamics of the persona/narrator who records the processes of comprehension and apprehension. What is often a key element in a stream-of-consciousness narrative is the assimilation of the outer world to the inner, a place where events, ideas, and perceptions blend to form not just a story but the process behind the making of a story. The problem is that the actual wood pile the persona discovers is an ambiguity, an anomaly in the landscape that cannot be explained. Art, poetry, and even wood cutting suggest an inherent desire for resolution; yet that resolution is missing from "The Wood-Pile," and if the purpose of art and poetry is to improve or reform the world as we know it, then that resolution must be present not only in the narrative but nature. The poet in Frost hopes this is ...