A powerful and persuasive new reading of Frost as a poet deeply engaged with both the literary and public politics of his day.
In his new study of an iconic poet, Tyler Hoffman challenges prevailing assumptions about the relation between Robert Frost's poetry and his theory of form and reveals the poet as responsive to both the aesthetics of modernism and the public issues of the time. In a series of subtle and sophisticated readings of the poems, Hoffman shows that in practice Frost regularly, and happily, disregarded his own, oft-repeated pronouncements about form and poetic sense. Indeed, he argues, it is precisely in the ambiguity produced by these departures, and in the inability of the authorial voice to totally command a reader's response and interpretation, that so much of the power of Frost's poetry resides.
In addition to exploring Frost's entanglements with modernist aesthetics, Hoffman revises commonly held views of the poet's political commitments and the politics of his formalism. Through his readings, Hoffman argues that Frost's poetic practice is fundamentally progressivist. In his concluding chapter, Hoffman considers the postcolonial legacy of Frost's poetry and theory of poetic form, with particular attention to the work of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky.
From the Book:
"Hoffman's intense, nuanced, and sophisticated reading of the poetry itself goes a long way toward reestablishing Frost in his political time as a man and poet concerned with the issues of the day, such as the complex relationship between the individual and the state. These terms are translated, by him and others, into the politics of poetry itself. Hoffman understands these politics, and he makes them visible in ways that have not been previously accomplished." -- from the Foreword by Jay Parini
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TYLER HOFFMAN is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University. Jay Parini, author of the acclaimed Robert Frost: A Life, has written a foreword situating Hoffman's critical perspective among the alternative and often contentious previous approaches to Frost's poetry.
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