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Ci's Reviews > Frost: Poems
Frost: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
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Lionel Trilling said in his introduction of Anna Karennina (1951) "To comprehend unconditioned spirit is not so very hard, but there is no knowledge rarer than the understanding of spirit as it exists in the inescapable conditions which the actual and the trivial make for it". Trilling might have been talking about Frost, because in his poetry, the actual and trivial fully embodies a spirit both universal and particular.
Frost is often the opposite of the expansive, pantheistic and self-referential Whitman. Most of the poems are accessible, painting the actual and the particular details of a situation, often the wooded forest or farm-work, farmers and their women. Yet often there is a special glint, a spark of insight, a vein of dark fault-line, lying under the rustic and common scenes. That is the Frostian knowledge of human life, both the body and spirit existences in the very particular rural New England.
Frost is often the opposite of the expansive, pantheistic and self-referential Whitman. Most of the poems are accessible, painting the actual and the particular details of a situation, often the wooded forest or farm-work, farmers and their women. Yet often there is a special glint, a spark of insight, a vein of dark fault-line, lying under the rustic and common scenes. That is the Frostian knowledge of human life, both the body and spirit existences in the very particular rural New England.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
July 16, 2015
– Shelved
July 16, 2015
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Finished Reading
According to Trilling, Frost represents, "the terrible actualities of the life in a new way. I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet…�..The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe. Read the poem called Design and see if you are warned by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived."