Toward Robert Frost

The Reader and the Poet

Title Details

Pages: 360

Trim size: 5.500in x 9.000in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 04/01/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5265-7

List Price: $93.95

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/01/1994

ISBN: 9-780-8203-1621-5

List Price: $34.95

Related Subjects

LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry

Toward Robert Frost

The Reader and the Poet

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  • Description
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Every poem, Robert Frost declared, "is an epitome of the great predicament, a figure of the will braving alien entanglements". This study considers what Frost meant by those entanglements, how he braved them in his poetry, and how he invited his readers to do the same. In the process it contributes significantly to a new critical awareness of Frost as a complex artist who anticipated postmodernism—a poet who invoked literary traditions and conventions frequently to set himself in tension with them.

Using the insights of reader-response theory, Judith Oster explains how Frost appeals to readers with his apparent accessibility and then, because of the openness of his poetry's possibilities, engages them in the process of constructing meaning. Frost's poems, she demonstrates, teach the reader how they should be read; at the same time, they resist closure and definitive reading. The reader's acts of encountering and constructing the poems parallel Frost's own encounters and acts of construction.


Commenting at length on a number of individual poems, Oster ranges in her discussion from the ways in which the poet dramatizes the inadequacy of the self alone to the manner in which he "reads" the Book of Genesis or the writing of Emerson. Oster illuminates, finally, the central conflict in Frost: his need to be read well against his fear of being read; his need to share his creation against his fear of its appropriation by others.

This thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of Frost as 'reader' of his subject matter—nature, the Eden story, human entanglements—and how readers respond to Frost's poetry is a significant addition to Frost criticism and a valuable contribution to reader-response theory and to our understanding of the processes of reading and writing.

—Library Journal

About the Author/Editor

JUDITH OSTER is an assistant professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, where she teaches poetry and directs the composition program. She is the author of From Reading to Writing: A Rhetoric and Reader.