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Robert FrostA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Birches” is a quintessential Frost poem, in form, subject, and tone. Drawing on his experience living in rural New England, Frost often took that landscape as the subject of his poems. In “Birches,” it is not a stretch to read the speaker as Frost himself—the meditative, poetic seeker of philosophical truths within the context of the natural world. Critic Carol Frost points out, “For Frost the work of the poet was to collect, like a botanist in the bogs and fields, then to imagine what would suffice for a poem that would be his” (Frost, Carol. “Sincerity and Inventions: On Robert Frost.” 2014. Academy of American Poets). In “Birches,” Frost does exactly this, collecting and presenting complex images of birch trees, and allowing the reader to visualize them in a fresh, stunning way.
Frost’s writing about the natural world parallels the care he takes with the written word. In “Birches,” he describes the young boy, a stand-in or memory for Frost’s own childhood self, as careful in his approach to the birches but also reveling in the joy they provide. Frost might have felt similarly about the role of poetry and the art and craft he took as a writer. While careful and meticulous in the fashioning of his images and lines, he also recognized the form’s ability to describe and produce joy in both the writer and the reader.
While Frost experienced wide popularity in America after his return from England around the time of the First World War, he never fit neatly into the literary categories of the time, eschewing the trappings of Modernism that many fellow poets, like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot espoused. In some ways, Frost’s form aligned more closely with some of the Victorian or Romantic poets of earlier generations, with his liberal use of blank verse and his dedication to natural images. Critic James M. Cox notes, “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet […] it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry” (“Robert Frost.” Poetry Foundation). Frost utilized the craft elements of the previous generation of writers but put his own spin on them, drawing on more modern notions like Ezra Pound’s imagism, and the use of a colloquial voice to freshen and update the older forms. To explain how he thought about poetry in a 1932 letter to his friend Sydney Cox, Frost wrote: “The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. ... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful” (“Robert Frost.” Poetry Foundation), suggesting that the reader should take Frost’s writing at face value and understand the work as separate from its creator.
By Robert Frost