Ecocriticism in the Poems of Robert Frost

Name: Riddhi S. JaniRoll No: 23Paper: 10, The American LiteratureSemester: 3rd

Submitted To: Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University

What is Ecocriticism ?

• In simple words, “Ecocriticism is a study of the relationship between literature and physical environment.”

• Lawrence Buell is the pioneer of Ecocriticism.• Influenced by Emerson. • What do Ecocritics do ? Or what the Ecocritics study in any

literary work ?

• “Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture…” (by Cheryll Glotfelty)

• “All that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ecocritical Views• “Human beings [are] ecologically or

environmentally embedded.” by Lawrence Buell

• “Remediation of humankind’s alienation from the natural world” –Buell

• “World of nature and the world of men are parts of the same world.” –Dana Phillips (An Ecocritic)

• “Humanity is literally part of Nature” –Neil Evernden

• Another concern of most of the Ecocritics is anthropocentric idea.

• Luc Ferry suggests that nature “should be disciplined, polished, and cultivated, in short…humanized .”

• They thinks nature as controllable by humans.

Ecocriticism and Robert Frost

• Robert Frost (1874-1963) is an American poet.

• He won Pulitzer Prize in poetry four times.

• Mainly a nature poet.

• Why to see his poems from an Ecocritical sight ?

Ecocriticism in Frost’s Poem

• First comes rhythm and style that Frost mostly didn’t write in free verse.

• He gives most of the place to nature elements like wood, trees, flower, domestic animals, land (i.e. earth).

• He treats nature in both positive and negative ways.

• The rural life is depicted largely in his poems.

• In the poem “The gift Outright”,

“The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years.”

• Land (i.e.nature) is personified here. (Why humans are not ‘naturified”?)

• By these lines we can see that Frost sees nature as ‘the other’ and as ‘the thing’ or as ‘a commodity’, which can be given, taken, bought, sold or won.

• In the poem “Mending Wall”:

• Wall and trees:• Trees seem to be the cause of the separation of the

neighbour. “There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.”

• Juxtaposition between human construction and nature.

• In the poem “Design”:

• He questions to the destructiveness of nature.

“Assorted characters of death and blight”

“What brought the kindred spider to that height,Then steered the white moth thither in the night?What but design of darkness to appall?—”

• He is accepting only the beauty of the nature, for his own purpose. And he is not seeing nature as its whole.

• In the poem “The Road not Taken”:

• In this poem, he after thinking logically chooses one path which is “less traveled by”.

“Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claimBecause it was grassy and wanted wear”

“In leaves no step had trodden black.”

“I shall be telling this with a sigh”

• In the underlined lines we find contradiction.

• In the poem “Stopping by Woods”:

• That “otherness” between human and nature is seen.

• And the anthropocentric idea is reflected here.

“My little horse must think it queer”

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep But I have promises to keep And miles to go before I sleep,”

• In the poem “Fire and Ice”:

• It seems that Frost is taking the ‘ice’ as negative phenomenon.

“I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also great”

“A snow-drop spider” (Design)

“He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.” and “frozen lake” (Stopping by Woods)

• This is how we can do a keen reading of this poem from an Ecocritical sight.

• In our subconscious the feeling of being superior than nature is always laid.

• So, in this way we can do the ecocritical reading that how the writer treats the nature.

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