“The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost

Frost as A Traditional and A Nontraditional Poet

There is no doubt in claiming that Robert Frost is one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to poetry. However, the question of whether he should be considered as a traditional or a modern poet remains debatable. The Traditional poetry is a literary art, which can be categorized by its evocative and aesthetic qualities. On the other hand, the modern poetry includes free verses. In other words, modern poems are the free styling of the poet's words. In modernism, the verses do not have to rhyme (Richardson, pp.58). On the contrary, they should be blending within the subject and leading from an occurrence to another.

Judging by these basic definitions of traditional and modern poets and taking into account majority of his writings and his personnel perspectives, it will be fair to declare Frost as a traditional poet. He usually preferred writing poems of lengths ranging from short to medium. However, the most predominant factor in his poems is that they are well structured and well organized in terms of rhyme, rhythm and meter. Frost was in fact the core supporter of the traditional poetry since the modernists' poetical approach was introduced. He chose for his poems a traditional stanzaic organization (Oster, pp.35). He believed that this form highlights various technical aspects of the poetry. Hence, Frost always took great delight and pleasure in these things. He could also be considered as a metricist. However, the most important prove of Frost being the traditional poet is his self-claim. He quoted,

"I would sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down."

Therefore, Frost's attachment to the established meter, the fixed forms, and the rhyme is traditional. His poems “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” and “Fire and Ice” are both good examples of the principles of traditional poetry followed by Frost. I must be noted that when Frost wrote “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”, it seemed that he chose the classic flavor of poetry. The poem has 4 stanzas of 4 lines and follow a structure rhyming. Moreover, his most famous poems mainly "The Road Not Taken" do not revise or unsettle any nineteenth century notion s of the idea or form. However, the interesting thing to note is that Frost's work and writing show some really strong and prominent highlights of the modern or nontraditional forms of poetry. This is simply because his conversational rhythms and his existential sensibility in many poems are modernist. His greatest poems that includes "The Most of It" and “Directive” do radically challenge the old and conventional conceptions of culture, memory, and also ways of beholding and perceiving the nature (Greenblatt & Meyer, pp.48).

Frost also wrote many sonnets that can be categorized as both Italian or Petrarchan such as “Design” and English or Shakespearean such as “The Silken Tent”. However, his sonnets diverge often from the traditional forms. For example, “Mowing,” was composed in compliance with the Petrarchan ...