Robert Frost Naturalist, Spiritual Drifter and Pragmatic Empiricist

  A four-time winner of the Pulitzer prize for poetry, Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) created a new poetic language that has a deep and timeless resonance. His poems include dramatic dialogues and narratives--stories of farmers and their families, farm workers and villagers, poems of joy and tragedies, written in a language, like Wordsworth's language "everyday language", without sentimentality or melodrama. The simple images and themes of Frost's poems are interwoven into a complex pattern of provocative ideas and observations.
Any poem by Frost is an act of interpretation, an inquiry into the resources of the language it can make available to itself. His poetry about work is quite directly about the correlative work of writing a poem and of reading it. Any intense labor enacted in his poetry, like "mowing", or "apple picking", "Mending wall", can penetrate to the visions, dreams, myths that are at the heart of reality, constituting its articulate form. Manual labor in Frost's poetry is often an image of the effort to penetrate matter.
Several of Frost's poems sprang from his own experiences. "Storm Fear" for example, is about the frightening, trapped feeling of being snowed in. The elation and hope that come with spring are evident in "To the thawing wind", which is an incantation. Sound and metaphor in Frost's poetry are a source of energy, not signs of meaning ultimately to be enforced. 
It is not necessary, even if it were possible, to deal with all Frost's poems in this paper. Instead, besides the topics discussed above, the poems chosen as poems which are relevant to the subject matter of this paper of these poems are mentioned fast in passing. The main subjects that this paper tries to tackle and discuss are: Frost's theory of poetry and its application, the naturalist, the spiritual drifter, and the pragmatic empiricist.