Robert Frost`s Use of Nature in his Poems

Nature in Robert Frost 's Poetry

Nature is certainly an important subject in Frost 's poetry . But Frost is not a Nature poet in the tradition of Wordsworth . Frost 's best poetry is concerned with the drama of man in nature whereas Wordsworth is generally best when emotionally depicting the natural scenery . Frost said in 1952 : I guess I 'm not nature poet . I have written only two poems without a human being in them (---- )Frost said that he had a lover 's quarrel with the world (The lesson from Today ) This

lover 's quarrel is Frost 's poetic subject , and throughout his poetry there is evidence of this view of man 's existence in the natural world

Frost regards the natural world as impersonal and unfeeling . There are poems in which Frost speaks directly to objects of nature , as Wordsworth does . But most of the time Frost differs from Wordsworth in treatment of nature and it attitude toward man . In The Tree at My Window , he speaks to a tree which is tossed about by the winds , comparing its state to his own . In these cases of direct address , however , we do not get the feeling that Frost recognizes any kind of brotherhood toward natural objects , which Wordsworth expresses through much of his poetry . In Frost , man always differs essentially from other things and objects . His trees , though he speaks to them , do not put on a grave expression . The weather that hits them is outer (the tree at my window ) whereas his (Frost ) pathos and miseries are internal and are not exploited by any outer ' element . Lynen (1960 ) rightly depicted the differences between Frost 's Nature poetry and those of Lake Poets . He says

That Frost 's view of nature is unique may not at first be apparent , for the modern reader 's attitude toward nature poetry is pretty well determined by the Lake Poets and their English successors . The very act of writing about nature seems to mean a commitment to treat it as poets in England have done since 1800 , with the result that most people take Frost 's nature poetry as they take Wordsworth 's or Tennyson 's . Yet there is a bleakness in his landscape and a sharpness of outline in the imagery quite foreign even to Wordsworth 's Cumberland . This cannot be explained by the difference between localities "The Oven Bird " is an entirely different kind of poem from Wordsworth 's "To a Skylark " and the dissimilarity has little to do with the fact that the bird in one poem is American and in the other English . Another sign of his uniqueness is that his nature poems do not evoke the same variety of emotional response . Much of his popularity is traceable to the fact that he has managed to write of nature without exploiting the emotional effects which , however fine they are in Wordsworth and the other Romantics , seem rather shopworn in more recent poets (Chapter 5

Frost treats Nature as...