Make Good Neighbors Back And Forth Essay - 1,998 words

And the work is play for mortal stakes, For Robert Frost it seemed that the deed of writing and interpreting his poetry never ended. His technique included simple dialect and description, his imagery was physical yet hypothetical, and his method showed his opposing views of the universe. Frost said, The subject of poetry should be common in books should happen to everyone but it should have occurred to no one before as material (Trachea 165). He was known to use anything he could to help the reader understand his writings, and in their own way, learn to interpret them into useful paragons for everyday living. Frost said that poems were merely a basis for which humans can perform in the face of the confusions of everyday life. In addition to drawing on familiar subject matter as a means of affording him the kind of originality he sought, Frost placed great emphasis on his choice of simple image-making words and phrases for the same reason (Trachea 166).


He is said to have to think more deeply to call up images in order to convey his ideas. Frost uses simple dialect to express the simplicity and eagerness of the American language (Trachea 92). So far as Frost is concerned, the very measure of poetic performance is in the degree to which it can domesticate the imagination of disaster (Trachea 114). Frost creates an atmosphere of depth, pulling the reader into the story by his use of descriptive adjectives, such as ancient, fresh-painted, and velvety (Hadas 59). Frosts descriptions help us hear the pounding of rain, the rustling of the leaves on trees, and feel the harshness of the cold (Trachea 117).


A few of his other descriptions are the desolation, silence, and emptiness that he uses to describe the cottage in Black Cottage. These terms allow the reader to be drawn in wholly to the story, and they enhance the rhetorical drama of what is occurring- the decay of civilization (Hadas 63). Though it seems that Frosts work can easily be interpreted through his diction, it is impossible to correctly interpret anything of his without the use of voice inflection (Trachea 114). Frosts prose as well as his poetry can be studied for the sound of sense, for the casual qualities of voice and personality he artfully gets into it (Trachea 87).


Frost said that the reader gives words meaning by the way he speaks them, and if a poem is read without the correct use of tone, its meaning is lost all together. Frost was known for his sensitivity to sound: he listened first to the human voice and secondly to the voice of nature and he demonstrated both in his works. To Frost sounds were the gold in the ore just as is stated in one of his poems: natures first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold (Trachea 90 - 2). He said sounds are summoned by the imagination and they must be profound, confident, and forceful in order to achieve the full effect of the poetry. Frost depended on this sound of sense to build his images by use of metaphor and sentence (Trachea 166). There were two reasons Frost insisted on the use of metaphor in his poetry: 1) he said that poets tended to think metaphorically, and 2) they tended to speak in metaphor to convey specific ideas (Potter 164).


He did not believe in creating new ideas into peoples minds, rather he created new pictures of old ideas. He perceived the world with beauty and strongest and to calm the emotional response, he filtered it through the intellect and put it into a metaphor, thus subjecting it to his form of artistry. Frost felt that if he as a poet was able to have these different perceptions of the world, his readers should be able to appreciate them, even if he only hinted at them. He thought as Emerson did: the correspondence between objects were what began the process of poetic creation (Potter 165). Frost also used the device of sentence structure to demonstrate how the voice should be carried when one read a poem.


Frost believed that sentences were not different enough to hold the attention of a reader unless they were dramatic and he proved this statement in his writing. He said that a sentence is merely where words live and breath, and that they are sounds in themselves along which other sounds called words may be strung. Frosts conception of the sentence is central to his poetic theory and anticipates both the phonological approach and the emphasis in modern linguistics on the connection between structure and meaning (Trachea 90 - 1). Frost uses two main kinds of imagery in his work: concrete and abstract. His concrete images can be found in Mending Wall, and the Black Cottage. The wall is always interpreted to be a stronghold, while the house is interpreted as empty, inaccessible, and burnt out.


However, both come to represent to the center of lives (Hadas 68). In Mending Wall, Frost keeps the wall the focus of attention and thus suggests that the persons on either side are equal, when in fact they are not. The matter of the wall and the need for fences is argued over before the end of the poem, for many feel that fences dont make good neighbors, but the making of fences can. Many critics have come to believe that the statement good fences make good neighbors is only neighborly if the speaker reads it correctly (Hadas 55 - 7). The wall is used to both separate men and bring them together, and it is imperative to see and understand that each of these functions are different yet the same (Potter 49). As one may assume, a house or cottage is usually a stronghold, however, the house in Black Cottage represents desolation-the removal of life, family and love (Hadas 58).


Frost begins to show a regretful side in this poem ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: mending wall, back and forth, frost, potter, make good neighbors

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