Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry

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.