Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

(2.) All quotations from Francis's poetry except "For the Ghost of Robert Frost" are from Collected Poems, 1936-19 76. All quotations from Frost's poetry are from The Poetry of Robert Frost, except as otherwise noted.

(3.) William Mulder maintains that Dickinson and Frost read "nature and society as manuals of instruction," with "facts flowering into truths of conduct... into ethics, a secular sermon." Mulder differs from Richardson in limiting this habit of perception "to a tradition which runs from the New England Primer to Poor Richard's Almanac to Walden" (550).

(4.) For more on the impact of Greek Stoicism on Emerson's perception of nature, see Richardson 233-34.

(5.) Francis first published his thoughts about Frost's "laissez-faire" inclination to "let things take their course" in "Robert Frost from His Green Mountain" (117).

(6.) In his comment on the poem, George Monteiro emphasizes these images: "Frost's ovenbird reminds us dryly and matter-of-factly that spring's luxuriance of flowers diminishes by midsummer in the ratio of 'one to ten'" (98).

(7.) This view of Francis's preciousness, his contrast with Frost, and the reflection that he seldom attains Frost's bitter lyricism underlie David Graham's discussion of his poems. In A Time to Talk, Frost in fact "defined [Francis's] greatest danger as preciousness" (69).

(8.) Robert Pack observes about "The Oven Bird": "The poem itself...is indeed what the poet has made. It is an order, a design, to set against uncertainty, to set against 'the fall' and against death" (12).

(9.) George Monteiro compares "Design" to Frost's earlier version of the poem, titled "In White" (1912). One of the changes Frost made in the final version was to incorporate "the important metaphor of kitchen domesticity" into "the tableau of spider, moth, and ritual death which he has observed" (36-37).

(10.) In American literature, Jonathan Edwards, leader of New England's religious revival in the 1740s, has in mind the "Argument from Design" in a 1723 document known as his "Spider letter," in which his close description of spiders spinning their webs reflects an eighteenth-century belief in a benevolent God. Edwards remarks on "the exuberant goodness of the Creator who hath not only provided for all the necessities but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects" (5).

WORKS CITED

Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings of Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York: Modern Library, 1981.

Francis, Robert. Collected Poems, 1936-1976. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1976.

_____. "For the Ghost of Robert Frost." Painted Bride Ouarterly 35 (1988): 20.

_____. "Robert Frost from His Green Mountain." Dalhousie Review 33.2 (Summer 1953): 117-27.

_____. The Satirical Rogue on Poetry. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1968.

_____. A Time to Talk. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972.