Robert Frost

Introduction

Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. "Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet," writes James M. Cox, "it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries (Richardson, 83).

Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor point out in Poems for Study, "Frost's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

Analysis of the Metaphors used by Robert Frost

Robert Frost's insightful yet tragic poem “Out, Out--” employs realistic imagery and the personification of a buzz saw to depict how people must continue onward with their lives after the death of a loved one, while also hinting at the selfish nature of the human race, which oftentimes show concern only for themselves (Waggoner, 27). The poem narrates the story of a boy who dies as a result of accidentally cutting off his hand with a buzz saw in his own yard. Frost employs imagery to reveal the setting, the boy's “yard” in “Vermont” right before “sunset”, using vivid detail to describe the “five mountain ranges” within eyesight of the yard.

The narrator foreshadows the tragic event to come when he “wishes” that the workers would have “[called] it a day” and “[given]” the boy “the half hour that (he) counts so much when saved from work”, the adult responsibility of cutting wood with a buzz saw this is an excellent analysis on style: Frost begins the poem by describing a young boy cutting some wood using a buzz-saw. The setting is Vermont and the time is late afternoon (Richardson, 74). The sun is setting and the boy's sister calls him to come and eat supper. As the boy hears its dinner time he gets excited and cuts his hand by mistake. Realizing that the doctor might cut his hand off because of this, he immediately asks his sister to make sure that does not happen. By the time the doctor arrives it is too late and the hand is already lost. When the doctor gives him anaesthetic, the boy falls asleep never to wake up again. The last sentence of the poem which states that "since they [the boys family and the doctor] were not the one dead, turned ...