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Symbolism In Robert Frost's Poems

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Symbolism

The symbolic technique followed by Frost is also very modern in nature.

The poems that are rich in symbolic meaning are Mending Wall, The

Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Birches

etc. Mending Wall is a symbolic poem in which he describes an

anecdote typical of the conservative approach of the rural people in New

England, but it has the universal symbolic implication.

The poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is also full of

symbols. The poem symbolically expresses the conflict which everyone

feels between the demands of the practical life and a desire to escape into

the land of reverie. The closing stanza of the poem is especially symbolic.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have …show more content…

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 modem subjects

as ‘the boredom implicit in sensuality’, ‘the consciousness of neuroses

and ‘the feeling of damnation’. But the recent critical conversations have

resuscitated a little noted argument from the late seventies in favour of

viewing frost as modernist. While Frost does not place the whole course

of Western history into doubt or experiment with innovative formal

structure and with the position of the reader - characteristics of the work

of other modernist poets - he does tend toward a critique of the increasing

alienation of modem life, as well as foster a sense of the visual that is so

important to some groups of modernists like the irnagists (who favourably

reviewed Frost’s work).

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 modem life. He argues that it provides him with a point of

view.

Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on

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