Abstracts

• Sebastian Bach - Boston University
• Rachel Buxton - Oxford University
• Deirdre Fagan - University of Miami
• David Haglund - Oxford University
• Robert B. Hass - Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
• Sean Heuston - The Citadel
• Sara Hilinski - Boston University
• Marit MacArthur - University of California, Davis
• Ann Mikkelsen - American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Gerard Quinn - University College, Dublin
• Stephen Regan - Royal Holloway, University of London
• Beth Ellen Roberts - University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast
• Lisa Seale - University of Wisconsin, Marathon County
• Jennie Sykes - Oxford University
• John Talbot - Brigham Young University

Sebastian Bach - Boston University

In his dedication to Mountain Interval (1916), Robert Frost writes, "TO YOU who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, ... but that the first interval of all was the old farm, our brook interval, so called by the man we had it from in sale" (emphasis added). From this strikingly ungrammatical fragment several implications arise. First, the dedicator suggests that the memory of the "South Branch" interval or low-lying land near a watercourse need not be restored to the dedicatee but that the memory of "the old farm" must be restored to the forgetful dedicatee. Second, what is restored describes a second identity, "our brook interval," which falls between ("inter-") the signifier "the old farm" and the farm itself, a second identity assigned by a voice that also determines the land's market value. Therefore, "our brook interval" functions as a type of fetish, an object a that acts as a screen between the observer and an original object of desire; in this case, however, the form of this fetish points toward the commodification of land and, insofar as the land represented here is of a literary nature (a Mountain Interval), the commodification of art.
Written at a time when his work as poet had begun to yield serious recognition from British and American critics, the poems of Mountain Interval develop peculiarly vacillating positions on labor and commodity, the fruits of the land and the manmade artifact, and "the country" and "the city." Taken together, these positions indicate a trend in Frost's poetry toward consumerism and commodity fetishism that, while seemingly condemning the urban culture of resource exploitation and commodification, also implicates both country poet and country farmer in similar practices. This paper proposes to trace the ways in which "Christmas Trees: A Christmas Circular Letter" and "In the Home Stretch" engage in processes of denial and affirmation of commodity fetishes in an American scene whose capitalism is deeply rooted its soil. The emphasis on commodity fetishism in Frost's poems lies not in a critique of capitalism, however, but in an enriching engagement with an economic system and a world in which originary things are lost and inadequate yet proximate substitutes produced (objets a). In addition, this paper will highlight how the equally peculiar syntax of Frost's poems implicates language as a metafetish that is a means of demystification and fetishization at once.

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Rachel Buxton - Oxford University

Robert Frost is a vital figure for a number of contemporary Northern Irish writers. Poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin discuss him at length in interviews and in their criticism, and the Frostian influence permeates much of their poetry. This paper focuses on the ways in which Frost's attitudes towards form and play - on both aesthetic and metaphysical levels - have filtered into the poetry and various critical writings of Paul Muldoon.

Muldoon has long been attracted to Frost's studied slyness and wryness. As he perceives it, there are two areas in which this Frostian 'knowingness' operates. Firstly, there is the knowingness of a crafted, controlled and controlling, form. Secondly, there is the fact that many of Frost's poems have, built into them, an element of arbitrariness, of playful unpredictability - a quality Muldoon has termed Frost's 'calculated capriciousness'. Muldoon discusses Frost's 'The Silken Tent' as a pertinent example of the combination of these two qualities. Much of Muldoon's work displays the same fusion of structure and serendipity, of seemingly random behavior within systems of formal constraint.
Frost's and Muldoon's approach to metaphysical matters parallels their conviction that, in the composition of a poem, freedom is most often evident within, and indeed dependent upon, the constraint of a design. Both poets, when speaking or writing of cosmological or theological issues, profess a belief in external constraints - be they societal, genetic, or a 'fate' imposed by a deity - within which human free will might operate. Frost's poems 'Design' and 'Stars' are of particular significance in this regard, as are Muldoon's 'Blemish', 'White', and 'Incantata', all three of which demonstrate a marked, if tangential, relation to Frost.

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Deirdre Fagan - University of Miami

Frost: Not a Nature Poet?

In Robert Frost one rarely senses struggle in the making of a poem, yet his apparent ease is an ease about difficulties. The ease is in the craft; the difficulties lie in what the poet takes on, lurking somewhere beneath the surface of the poem, or even beyond the poem. This makes Frost deceptive, and variously misunderstood.

Despite his popularity as the foremost New England nature poet, Frost once said in an interview: "I guess I'm not a nature poet, I have only written two poems without a human being in them." To think of him as a white-haired high priest of the freshly fallen snow and burgeoning spring is to deny his darker aspects. He is drawn to nature but his work is about the human coming to terms with nature in all its aspects. He is never altogether at ease in a natural landscape, and while his fears and anxieties are not always readily apparent, his relationship to nature is far more complex than it might at first seem.

Frost concerns himself mostly with trees, leaves, snow, and, not surprisingly, frost. He is interested both in what nature can do for us and to us. The poet may find grief in nature, but he rises above anguish, and the poetry's deeper meanings are conveyed with subtlety. Frost's inner and outer nature are not necessarily things to be feared, but they are certainly things with which to contend.

Frost's viewpoints are disparate. He sometimes sees nature as redemptive, at other times as injurious. His ability to inspect nature in seemingly discordant ways reveals how discerning he is about his own uncertainty. He takes nature as it is, and does not ascribe to it any intentionality -- harmful or benevolent.

Frost's nature is about contradictions. He might very well have said with Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself."
This paper will present an analysis of Frost's relationship to nature, providing examples through various poems.

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David Haglund - Oxford University

"Puke or Prude": Frost and Stevens in the Literary Marketplace, 1923

Frost critics noticed long ago that general popularity often impinges upon a writer's status with more literary or academic readers. In 1977, Richard Poirier wrote that 'Frost has not escaped the gravitational pull of general popularity which keeps him from orbiting in a constellation of great poets.' A quarter of a century later, the effect lingers: in 2001, Jay Parini wrote that Frost's 'popularity with a mass audience' explains in part why 'Frost's work has been oddly neglected by younger scholars in recent years.'

While this phenomenon in regard to Frost has long been noticed, it has never been seriously investigated. Frost himself recognized that by aiming for the 'readers who buy books in their thousands,' he might threaten his store of the 'esteem that butters no parsnips.' And that aiming has put academic readers of Frost-whose ideal, for the most part, is the disinterested artist-on the defensive. Lawrance Thompson's biography can be fairly caustic on the subject, and certainly didn't help matters. William Pritchard's Literary Life Reconsidered admirably defends Frost's literary campaigning, noting that it 'can be observed in a number of directions and might be regretted only if one thinks poets should be above such worldly concerns.' Even Pritchard, however, does not seem eager to dwell on the subject, and quickly moves on-though such matters are undoubtedly crucial to any 'literary life.'

In my paper I will pursue one or two of those 'directions' in which Frost's campaigning in the marketplace can be observed. I will focus on a particular moment both in Frost's career and in that of one of Frost's contemporaries who has the disinterested reputation par excellence. In September 1923, Wallace Stevens published his first book, Harmonium, with Alfred Knopf. Two months later, Frost published his fourth, New Hampshire, with Henry Holt. Each volume contained the longest poem then written by its author-Frost's often reviled 'New Hampshire' and Stevens' generally misunderstood 'The Comedian as the Letter C'-both of which, I think, have much to say about the position and the positioning of these authors at that particular moment in their respective careers. By reading these two wildly different poems both with and against each other, I aim to show that the 'interests' of any author are both more complicated than many critics will allow, and also are a worthy and rewarding subject for Frost-and other-studies.

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Robert B. Hass - Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

(Re) Reading Bergson: Robert Frost, Ezra Pound And the Legacy of Modern Poetry

One of the most conspicuous and troubling features of high modernism is that it never coalesced into the major literary movement its early practitioners hoped for. Despite the myriad manifestos and the self-conscious efforts on behalf of the period's leading figures to fashion an aesthetic equal to modern experience, high modernism, despite its early promise, quickly expired and could not be resuscitated. Why this happened is one of the most vexing problems in twentieth-century criticism-a problem all the more disquieting because poets and critics alike recognized, almost from the beginning, that something had gone terribly wrong with the modernist experiment.

While many scholars have offered a variety of plausible reasons for high modernism's decline, to my mind one of the most important, and unexplored, reasons was the modernists' inability to reconcile the epistemological tensions between positivism and vitalism. As the relations between these two important traditions became strained to the point of rupture, modern poets felt compelled to choose between an aesthetic that reflected the ethos of scientific humanism, then the dominant intellectual tradition, or one that liberated mental activity from physical explanation so as to emphasize the spontaneous freedom and contingency of an unfolding, creative consciousness. As I hope to make clear in this paper, this divide not only resulted in the divergent formal practices among the period's leading figures, but also initiated the continuing critical debate over whether modernism is a distinct literary period, with its own aims and methods, or simply a belated Romanticism.

One way to trace the origin of this epistemological tension is to go back to the beginning of the modernist movement and examine the early poetic theories of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound as they emerged in relation to the thought of Henri Bergson. Frost and Pound make excellent candidates for such a study because even though both were consorting in 1914 with the same London luminaries and discussing Bergson's influence upon literature, they developed entirely divergent aesthetic views. Such a divergence suggests that modernism was never really the hegemonic movement of literary elites, as scholars have often described it, but rather a much more varied and complex movement, fraught with the remnants of the nineteenth century's intellectual tensions. Although there is some disagreement over the degree to which Bergson influenced modern poetry, a careful examination of how Frost and Pound appropriated different elements of his thought will demonstrate how each serves as an exemplar of an opposing tradition, with Frost aligning himself with vitalism and Pound with positivism. While Bergson should in no way be regarded as the only or most important philosophical influence on modern poetics, he does serve this discussion nicely because he, perhaps more than any other philosopher of the period, struggled to forge a convincing synthesis between matter and mind without subordinating one to the other. His efforts to naturalize spirit and spiritualize nature informed Frost's and Pound's earliest theories, thereby setting the stage for the aesthetic ruptures that fractured modern poetry and helped shape contemporary schools.

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Sean Heuston - The Citadel

As We Know: Robert Frost, Proto-Postmodernist

In this paper I explain how careful examination of Frost's poems and prose remarks uncovers a proto-postmodern theoretical sophistication that belies the all-too-common misunderstanding of Frost as a simple rustic versifier one step removed from the cracker barrel. Frost's poetry shows a complex and nuanced understanding of the fundamental instability of language and frequently demonstrates an awareness of the ways language constructs reality. This component of Frost's work has gone largely unnoticed by critics, although it shows up repeatedly in Frost's poems and prose remarks. An exploration of this aspect of Frost's poetry and thought should contribute to the ongoing critical re-evaluation of Frost by yielding an understanding of the ways in which Frost is not only a Modernist, but is also a proto-postmodernist whose considerable attention to linguistic instability anticipates the centrality of the issue in postmodern poetics.

The narrative poems "Maple" and "West-Running Brook" are excellent examples of Frost's overlooked theoretical sophistication. This paper will refer to these poems as poems in themselves and as examples of how Frost's narratives work. "Maple" and "West-Running Brook" evince the sort of deep understanding of linguistic instability that contemporary Frost critics have yet to explore thoroughly. Frost demonstrates overt attention to and understanding of linguistic instability pre-Saussure (at least before Saussure's ideas were widely disseminated), pre-Derrida, and pre-Ashbery- that is, before widespread critical awareness of the issue.

In order to explain the ways in which Frost's linguistic instability is related to Frost's frequent tonal instability and tonal complexity, I refer to Randall Jarrell's 1953 essay "To the Laodiceans" and argue that indeterminacy of tone (which Jarrell explains without using the postmodern critical term) begets indeterminacy of meaning. I argue that although readers may choose particular interpretations in order to attempt to make sense of "Maple" or "West-Running Brook" (or a number of other poems that demonstrate Frost's deep awareness of indeterminacy), whatever sense they make is largely the readers' own. "Maple" and "West-Running Brook" exemplify the figure a Frost poem makes. Complex messages lie buried within the language of the poems. The question is whether readers and critics will discover them, or to what extent conclusive discoveries are even possible. Frost's readers and critics, like Frost's characters, may ultimately often see without perceiving, may and may not understand.

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Sara Hilinski - Boston University

Frost's Ghostly Poet and Phantom Reader: The Problem of Presence in "Ghost House" and "Desert Places"

How can there be a personal and differentiated life 'after,' it will then of course be asked, for those for whom there has been so little of one before? - unless indeed it be pronounced conceivable that the possibility may vary . . . from human case to human case, and that the quantity or the quality of our practice of consciousness may have something to say to it.

- Henry James, "Is There a Life After Death?"

Readers of "Ghost House" and "Desert Places," two poems that insist on the presencing of absent structures, speakers, and audiences, tend to attempt the resolution of paradoxes and syntactical ambiguities (including absent or multiple pronoun antecedents). The impossibly present but "vanished" dwelling in the earlier poem is often explained as a mental construct¹; many read "Desert Places" as displaying a "furtive impulse toward extinction" (Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), 181). In focusing on the complexity of Frost's discourse of simultaneous presence and absence and its implications for the poetic product, I suggest that Frost is concerned in these poems with creating a home for himself (or his speaker-poets) in his poetic structures (figured as the house itself in the earlier poem, and especially in "Desert Places," as the words of the poem itself)². Through the paradoxical presence and absence of the speaker-poets and their poems, Frost seems to ask, with Henry James, can one, through activity of the mind--such as poetry--solidify one's consciousness into a degree of eternal presence? Can the poet be in his or her poetry?

The attempts of Frost's poetic speakers to be present in their creations result in speakers who haunt the space of their poems, in a liminal state of life in death, presence in absence-never fully present to themselves, to their poems, or to their audience. The distance between the ghostly speaker-poets and their creations problematizes the status of the poem itself as coherent and complete; the poetic structures themselves threaten to fragment and envelop the speakers. Finally, in posing the question of how the ghostly compositions can be present to the reader, Frost suggests that the audience itself is drawn into and threatened by the ghostly logic of the poem--absorbed into a state of quasi-being that reveals the difficulty of "remaining," continuing to be, at all. The close consideration of the two aforementioned poems may have significance for other of Frost's poems about the dead and the ghostly, as Frost in several lyrics explores the possibility of sympathy. He puts his speakers in impossible relationships to the dead and in doing so questions the communicability of experience from poet to audience. However, "Ghost House" and "Desert Places" refuse to resolve their many impossibilities as they strive to speak across human boundaries, from the world of the ghostly to the world of the living.

¹ Or, as Frank Lentricchia argues, a "fanciful entertaining of romantic illusion" (Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (1975), 28).

² Andrew Bennett argues for a related phenomenon in Romantic poetry: he suggests that for Keats and other Romantics, "Writing 'lives on' after the death of the author, in posterity, a posthumous supplement of a life" (Keats, Narrative and Audience: the Posthumous Life of Writing (1994), 9).

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Marit MacArthur - University of California, Davis

Becoming a New England Poet: the Role of Tourism in Frost's Early Career

Today, Robert Frost is so deeply associated with rural New England that it can be difficult to re-imagine how this came to be. We have to remind ourselves, and especially the general reader, that Frost was a native of San Francisco who, after moving back east at the age of eleven, grew up in and around the "industrial city," as Frost himself saw it, of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

In fact, it was largely through the summer tourism industry of rural New England, which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that Frost was first introduced to and compelled by the beleaguered rural culture and landscape that would provide him with his poetic subject matter. In these years, Frost sometimes worked as a servant to summer tourists, and was increasingly a summer tourist himself, mostly in the New Hampshire lake district and the White Mountains. At the same time, the state governments of New Hampshire and Vermont were encouraging natives to return, as tourists, to shrinking rural villages, and to buy abandoned farms as summer homes. It was not until the age of twenty-six that Frost moved into the New Hampshire countryside for his brief attempt at farming in Derry, where he was perceived by the locals as an outsider. Even after the Derry years, as his poetic career advanced, Frost was sometimes accused by the press of being a wandering Californian who only summered in New England.

In this paper, I explore the influence of rural tourism in Frost's early development as a New England poet. In several poems, notably "The Generations of Men," "The Black Cottage," "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears and Some Books," and "Directive," I trace the evidence of this influence, and of Frost's ironic awareness of touristic interest in rural New England. These poems, which often feature figures of the tourist and the guide, can help us understand how, over time, Frost transformed himself from a summer tourist into the quintessential poetic tour guide to rural New England.

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Ann Mikkelsen - American Academy of Arts and Sciences

To Be a 'Good Villager': Robert Frost and the American Community

Robert Frost has been received both as a poet of the "local," specifically the product of a quasi-rural, New England, upbringing, and as a poet who carefully constructed his role as a "representative" speaker for the nation as a whole. Yet recent scholarship on Frost has dwelt sparingly upon the specific, often vexed, nature of Frost's historical locality and its relationship to his efforts to forge such a singular yet collective voice. I argue that Frost's sense of what John Dewey later called the "local," the space in which democracy must be reborn or founder, is marked by ethical anxieties that arose as the poet attempted to "represent" the experiences of factory workers and the unemployed whom he encountered over the course of his years living in and near the intensely urban, economically troubled mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost's relationships to the laborers and tramps who came to populate--and later haunt--poems such as "The Self-Seeker," "Two Tramps in Mud Time," and "The Lone Striker" are shaped by the volatile and often punishing economic and political conditions of the period and speak to his sense of a failing modern political economy. At the same time, Frost's poetry, correspondence, and interviews reveal his fear of being associated with such socially marginal individuals as he strove to create a marketable lyric persona fit for consumption in the public sphere. Even as he succeeded in winning a national, and even international, audience, however, Frost would return repeatedly to such scenes and individuals in attempts to imagine aesthetic and cultural resolutions to the social crises that persisted in American society. The result is a poetics whose approach to inequity and injustice is "transideologically" ironic, embodying both acquiescence and resistance to a national culture whose flaws Frost would repeatedly deny and reinscribe.

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Gerard Quinn - University College, Dublin

The Crooked Straightness of Frost and Emerson

Zigzag forward movement is an unusual image, and if presented as an approach to thought and to life, as Frost presents it, it is unique. Or almost unique, because the same image and idea is found in the most famous essay of an author who meant a lot to Frost: "Emerson is great, great, great" (Untermeyer 203).

In the well-known "foolish consistency" passage of "Self Reliance," Emerson advises us not to look back at what we said yesterday: "why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory?" (Or as Frost put it: "No one has seen him stumble looking back . . . . It is the future that creates his present")

The two-way zigzag movement in Emerson arises when you "speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today." When contradictory ideas are honest, their "varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency." (In his poem, Frost speaks of "a crooked straightness"; in his essay, "A Constant Symbol," he adds the Emersonian "zigzag": "The way will be zigzag, but it will be a straight crookedness.") Emerson tells us that "[g]reatness appeals to the future" (Frost: "It is the future that creates his present") and that "[e]very true man is a cause . . . and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients." (And Frost: "Any who seek him seek in him the seeker").

Frost's seeker is never fixed, he is always becoming. Here is how Emerson expressed it: "This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes. . . . Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state" (Emerson's italics). And in a more extended check for the source of "Escapist -- Never" it would be relevant that another of Frost's admired philosophers, Henri Bergson, made the idea of 'becoming' and 'ongoing change' central to his philosophy.

It is well known that Frost regarded William James as the best teacher Frost ever had. But James gave one other modern thinker, Henri Bergson, the highest praise, and we know that in 1911, as soon as it was published, Frost read and praised the translation of Bergson's Creative Evolution. Thompson tells us that Frost had been making adaptations from the writings of William James and Henri Bergson "for many years" (Thompson, Triumph 313). In Bergson's philosophy, the idea of 'becoming' rather than 'being' is central. And Bergson may have contributed 'seeking' 'for ever' and 'pursuit' to Frost's poem, because for Bergson, reality is found in the change and not beneath it: "In vain shall we seek beneath the change the thing which changes . . . . The mobile flees for ever before the pursuit of science" (Creative Evolution 317). And again Bergson: "we must not look back . . . life and action look forward" (Mind Energy 76).

As we examine what Frost did to Emerson's text in making "Escapist -- Never," it becomes easier to understand what Frost meant when he said: "First I am a teacher, second a philosopher, and third a poet" (Thompson, Triumph 588). He went out of his way to retain words and phrases from the ulterior text. He would be happy to have readers discover his source, and admire the thought in the source. His poem is a tribute to Emerson, in which the transtextuality betokens not anxiety of influence, but friendship.

"Escapist - Never" deals with a central strand in Frost's thought. The "interminable chain of longing" and the "pursuit of a pursuit forever" are tantamount to a description of the pursuit of the grail, and the grail is what Frost led us to in the key poem "Directive": "A broken drinking goblet like the Grail."

To write a biography of such a man would be difficult, as Lawrance Thompson discovered. Thompson's meticulous mind wanted cut and dried answers from a man whose mind was forever contradicting yesterday's thoughts as he pursued a path of crooked straightness.

The zigzag movement is modernist progression as distinct from linear premodern progression.

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Stephen Regan - Royal Holloway, University of London

Robert Frost and the American Sonnet

In recent years, the sonnet has been enjoying a tremendous popularity among readers and writers of poetry. Several new anthologies of sonnets have recently appeared, including two anthologies by American poet-critics: The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin (2001) and Sonnets from Dante to the Present, ed. John Hollander (2001). Robert Frost features prominently in both anthologies and his work also appears in The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller (2000). Even so, Frost has never been adequately appreciated as a writer of sonnets. Seamus Heaney praises his skill in utilising the form in Homage to Robert Frost, but there has been no sustained evaluation of Frost's contribution to a specifically American tradition of sonnet writing.

This paper will look at a number of well-known sonnets by Frost, including 'The Silken Tent', 'Acquainted with the Night' and 'Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same'. It will explore the various ways in which Frost adopted and modified European models of poetic form, including the terza rima sonnet, but it will also argue that there is a distinctively American sonnet tradition that Frost draws upon and significantly extends. The paper will suggest that a formalist approach of this kind, far from being narrowly concerned with poetic technique, highlights Frost's cosmopolitan acquaintance with both European and American poetic traditions and serves to challenge familiar stereotypes of the poet and his work.

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Beth Ellen Roberts - University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast

Transcending the Strife Method: Frost's Pragmatic Dialogues

Robert Frost's interest in overcoming dualities such as unity/plurality, spirit/matter, faith/empiricism, etc., has been well documented, as has his use of dialogue to represent opposing sides of dichotomies. Dialogue poetry inevitably reflects the One-Many paradox in that it exists simultaneously as the expression of the single voice of the poet and as the expression of multiple individual voices. Most critical examinations of Frost's dialogues have focused only on the content of these poems, particularly as they reflect the influence of William James and Henri Bergson. In my work, I explore how Frost manipulates the distances inherent in dialogue forms to reconcile form and content.

Frost called his early dialogues "eclogues," but these poems eschew the conflict inherent in the eclogue form, reflecting Frost's declaration in a 1926 letter to Sidney Cox that he forswears "taking sides on any one of these oppositions," which allows him to "transcend the strife-method." In the same letter, Frost associates narrative with a transcendent plane which subsumes dualities while allowing the opposing sides to remain distinct. In this paper, I suggest that Frost utilizes limited narration in the North of Boston dialogues to provide such a transcendent unity for the voices of each poem's speakers, allowing him to adhere to James's admonition to "equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism." The narration in these poems also engenders a provisional relationship between poet and reader, overcoming to some extent what he calls in "A Missive Missile" the "soul-to-soul abyss" and providing an impression of unity while maintaining his distance.

Frost's approbation of a transcendent unity waxed and waned over the years, and he modified his dialogue forms to reflect his changing attitudes. I compare the balanced treatment of oppositions in the early dialogues to the classic eclogue, "Build Soil," in which Frost trumpets an isolationist agenda, embraces plurality, and imposes distance between his speakers and between himself and the reader.

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Lisa Seale - University of Wisconsin, Marathon County

Current Research in Frost's Public Talks and Readings

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Jennie Sykes - Oxford University

Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams - replying to Greek and Latin with the bare hands?

In the opening to Paterson, William Carlos Williams describes his poetry as 'a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands' - a statement which, in spite of its ambiguity, suggests a desire to write in an American vernacular. Of course, Frost is also known for such a desire but approaches the issue of language very differently. When Williams wrote Paterson he was evidently partly responding to T.S. Eliot's refusal to equate 'making it new' with 'making it American' whilst Frost wrote popular poetry which apparently did not make such grand claims for itself. Of course, we are now in a better position to appreciate Frost's sophistication and in this paper I shall focus on his approach to language in poetry that combines the kind of patriotic irreverence we find in Williams with a respect for America's European heritage. As both poets are interested in what it means for a writer to use the language of his people there are many connections to be made - and through examining their differing practices I will suggest some ways that they can illuminate each other's work and also raise wider issues about language and nationality.

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John Talbot - Brigham Young University

Roman Rebuttals and "For Once, Then, Something"

"For Once, Then, Something" is the only poem Robert Frost ever composed in a classical meter: it is written in phalaecean hendecasyllabics. What lead him to depart, in that one instance, from his commitment to native English meters? So far no scholar or critic has ventured to say. My paper offers an explanation, and points to a greater subtlety in Frost's engagement with Latin poetry than has hitherto been proposed.

The hendecasyllabic meter - as Frost, Latin scholar and sometime teacher, well knew - was the signature meter of the Roman poet Catullus, whom Frost could quote in the original. Catullus is known for his witty and sometimes acrimonious responses to his critics, the most famous of which he wrote in hendecasyllabics. There is a link, then, between the hendecasyllabic meter and the poetic mode of rebuttal to one's critics.

That poets in the English tradition understood this link can be demonstrated by adducing the most famous English poem in hendecasyllabics prior to Frost: Tennyson's "Hendecasyllabics" (1863), in which the poet fires back at his magazine reviewers. An ardent admirer of Catullus, Tennyson naturally turned to the hendecasyllabic as the appropriate vehicle for such a retort.

By casting "For Once, Then, Nothing" into hendecasyllabics, Frost places his poem squarely in this tradition, at once ancient and modern. He thereby not only draws attention to the poem as a defense against critics ("Others taunt me..."), but summons to his side the towering authority of Catullus and Tennyson. I will conclude by suggesting that critics' neglect of many such classical connections has meant that a crucial dimension to Frost's work is going largely unnoticed.

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