InRobert Frosts Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis of well over one hundred of Frosts lyrics, considering each poem as an interrelated portion of the poets overarching constellation of intention. Beyond biography, this book offers extended, close readings of Frosts oeuvre, building its case incrementally from deftly examined particulars.
Zak discusses how the pastoral mode Frost adopts is no depleted, homespun idiom retreating from modernisms complexities, but a self-conscious determination to assume the prophetic mantle from his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau). Frosts version of pastoral represents no escape from lifes stresses, but the most constructive and life-sustaining means to address lifes struggles head onin both sense of that last phrase.
This book makes a case for Frost as Americas preeminent philosophical poet. The unfortunate effect of Frosts early detractors claim that he was merely an ironic and equivocal anecdotalist has for too long relegated his work to the second tier of the modernist poetic pantheon. This study, by contrast, supports Robert Graves claim for Frost as the first American poet who could be honestly reckoned a master poet by world standards.
Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Chapter One: The Certain Height of Frosts Visionary Elevations
Chapter Two: The Poet on the Reach of Intellection: Toughminded Tenderheartedness
Chapter Three: The Limits of Intellection, Part Two: Techne,Methe, andTheoria vs.Sophias Sacred Dance of Contraries
Chapter Four: Without Prejudice to Industry: the Fatuity of Life at Hard Labor
Chapter Five: The Poet, His Public, and the Call to Responsiveness
Chapter Six: The Occluded Dynamics of Dissociation inNorth of Boston
Chapter Seven: Mankinds Dual Destiny: Subject in and Subject to Nature
Chapter Eight: The Bound-less Need of Being: Versed in Country Things
Works Cited
