North Of Boston Poem Analysis

Abstract: North of Boston is Robert Frost’s second volume of poetry, published in 1914.If his first volume A Boy’s Will(1913)is an expression of his lyric genius in his next anthology he shows his skill in composing dramatic narratives or verse tales. They give a picture of the people living in the north of Boston in New England as seen by the poet. Each poem (with a few exceptions) seems to be a self- sufficient episode of a novel written in verse form. The episodes may be unconnected but they are held together by one common thread- the setting being in the northern part of Boston. In form thus it is akin to the novel, a super genre as envisaged by the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin. From a Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, a variety of social

‘… he never left the lyric for long’- this suggests that he left it and that was for a brief period of time. Untermeyer is obviously referring to Frost’s second anthology North of Boston. It is here he deviates from the lyric into the experimental blank verse monologues and dramatic narratives. In the entire Frost oeuvre it stands out as a different thing, in the sense that here he ‘says’ the poems of any social significance. Louis Bogan in his article ‘Achievement in American Poetry’ puts it rightly: ‘In North of Boston Frost briefly possessed himself of a humane realism and insight…’ (Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost

No voice is permitted to dominate and thus suppress the other. But in the society there is a hierarchy, a question of the master and the slave, the reality of domination and being dominated. But in the folk festival of the carnival Bakhtin found a new underlying social meaning. In many cultures during the time of carnival, all classes participate, and they all are allowed to violate social codes, flout authority, invert social strata and to profane what one ordinarily regards as being sacrosanct. He finds this in the classical, medieval and Renaissance culture and literature. He claims that the literary parallel to the carnival is best represented in the Renaissance writer Rabelais’