In spite of the
Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a
modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the
awareness of the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by
Science and Technology.
Critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. They do not treat such characteristically modern subjects as
‘the boredom implicit in sensuality’, ‘
the consciousness of neuroses’ and
‘the feeling of damnation’. Cleanth Brooks says:
“Frost’s best poetry exhibits the structure of symbolist metaphysical poetry. Much more clearly than does of many a modern poet.”
In fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the
disintegration of values in modern life and the
disillusionment of the modern man in
symbolical and metaphysical terms as much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal with persons suffering from
loneliness and frustration,
regrets and disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “
An old Man’s Winter Night”, the old man is
lonely, completely alienated from the society,
likeness, the
tiredness of the farmer due to over work in “
Apple-Picking” and as a result of it his yielding to sleep:
“For I have too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of great harvest I myself desired.”
In his nature poems, Frost has also commented on the
misery of the modern man which due to his going away from nature.
His
metaphysical treatment of the subject in some of his poems is also an evidence of his modernity. In
“Mending Walls”, Frost
juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:
“Good fences make good neighbour”
and the modern radical farmer says:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,”
According to J.F.Lynen the use of the
pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life. He argues that it provides him with a point of view.
Frost uses
pastoral technique only to
evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle. His pastoralism thus registers a protest
against the disintegration of values in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.
Another poetic technique adopted by Frost which makes him a modern poet is
symbolism.
“The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the
universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which
alienate them from one another
mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbours in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in
“Birches” symbolize
man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.
Unlike Romantics he has taken notice of both the
bright and dark aspects of nature as we see in his poem
“Two Tramps in Mud Time”. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking
turmoil and storms:
“Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath.”
In fact the world of nature in Frost’s poetry is not a
world of dream. It is much more
harsh,
horrible and hostile than the modern urban world. Hence his experience of the pastoral technique to comment on the human issue of modern world his realistic treatment of Nature, his employment of
symbolic and metaphysical techniques and the projection of the awareness of human problems of the modern society in his poetry justly entitle him to be looked up to
as modern poet.