Robert Frosts Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

(Hardback)

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In Robert Frosts Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis to well over one hundred of Frosts lyrics, considering each poem as integral to the poets singular constellation of intention. Beyond biography, this book offers extended, close readings of Frosts oeuvre, resulting in a case built up from deftly examined particulars.

Zak discusses how the pastoral mode Frost adopts is no depleted, homespun idiom retreating from modernisms complexities, but a self-conscious determination to assume the mantle of his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau) so central to the pastoral inheritance directing his thought. Frosts version of pastoral represents no escape from lifes stresses, but the most constructive and life-sustaining means to address lifes struggles head on: that is (as Frost declared) to take life by the throat in song in order to see what were made of.

A revaluation of Frosts major lyrics, this book makes a case for Frost as Americas preeminent philosophical poet. The unfortunate effect of Frosts early detractors claim that he was merely an ironic and equivocal anecdotalist has for too long relegated his work to the second tier of the modernist poetic pantheon. There was never anything disparately occasional nor self-protectively detached about his ambition; for him if poetry isnt understanding all, the whole world, then it isnt worth anything. Our illuminations may be but specks, but they nonetheless remain considerable, evidence of a graced re-source-fullness abounding within us, granting us our place among infinities. Lit by considerations illuminations-both of mind and heart-we remain, happily, free to make snug in the infinite darkness within and without us. This study reconfirms Robert Graves exalted claim for Frost as the first American poet who could be honestly reckoned a master poet by world standards.

Reviews

In Robert Frost's Visionary Gift: The Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak, a notable Shakespeare scholar in his own right, locates the source of Frost's poetic gifts in a habit of mind akin to John Keats' idea of "Negative Capability." In this refreshingly unsystematic book, Zak celebrates Robert Frost as a "figure of the will braving alien entanglements" and skillfully demonstrates that for Frost, a state of uncertainty, rather than serving as a cause of modern spiritual malaise, instead provides the poet with endless opportunities to contemplate the deepest mysteries of life without ever resorting to the easy consolations of organized religion or ossifying philosophies. Zak argues that Frost is a poet who fashioned his career out of "a modestly mindful state of being in being, ever wondering about wonder itself." In doing so, Zak also reminds us that Frost's poetic technique provides all of us with an exemplary method for how we too might brave our own alien entanglements, and for this lesson, I am very grateful.

--Robert Bernard Hass, author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost's Conflict with Science and Executive Director of the Robert Frost Society

Author Bio

William F. Zak is retired professor of English at Salisbury University.