5 - Frost as a New England Poet

Summary

To classify Robert Frost as a poet in a traditional New England vein can be dangerously misleading or entirely proper, depending on how you define your terms. Biographically, he was a New Englander not by birth but by adoption - or rather readoption: the first canonical writer to return from the New England diaspora to his parental region and claim it as his literary home. By the same token, artistically, Frost's tastes were cosmopolitan, not strictly regional. His first favorite poet was Poe; he was an able and zealous student of the classics, especially Virgil's Eclogues; he once described himself as “car[ing] most for Shakespearean and Wordsworthian sonnets”; the one significant fellow poet to whom he dedicated a poem was the English Georgian, Edward Thomas; and in the formation of his mature poetic styles no writers of the New England Renaissance era were more important to him than Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. Yet Frost was also acutely conscious of his relation to his New England precursors. Sometimes he showed it by explicit claim or allusion, more often obliquely, by imitation, repossession, echo, or parody - and not just by means of the written word. Also important to the construction of the Frost image was visual iconography: photographs like the one facing the title page of his 1949 Complete Poems (New York: Holt), which depicts the grizzled sage as serene Brahmin in a work shirt.