Frost as a Critical Theorist

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FROST AS A CRITICAL THEORIST They would not find me changed from him they knewOnly more sure of all I thought was true. (Into My Own) Despite Robert Frost's assertion of this dubious virtue, his ideas about poetry did change; at least the expression of them did. Although the central idea of the importance of the speaking voice remained with him, the language in which he talked about his poetry changed over the years from the technical ("tones," "voice-posture," "metrics") to the moral and psychological ("belief," "commitment," "courage," "prowess") and to the linguistic ("meaning," "metaphor," "naming"). His early critical ideas were wholly those of the craftsman; later ideas were those of the philosopher. A quality of abstraction creeps in - the result not simply of age, or fame, or rationalization, but of a broader concern for the nature and function of poetry. The heritage of poetic form against which Frost formulated his earliest ideas was the musical assonance of most nineteenth-century poetry. Poetry and music were seen as twin offspring of the same Victorian muse. Frost set out to wrench them apart. In a letter to John Bartlett in 1913 he explained: You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonised vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track. They went the length of it. Anyone else who goes that way must go after them. And that's where most are going. Frost, seeking a road less traveled by, began with a certainty that poetry was, in its essence, different from music. A light exchange with Louis Untermeyer indicates his irritation at any blurring of these two separate art forms. "Tell me, Louis," he wrote in 1915, "while it is uppermost in my mind what, when you are doing the high critical, do...