Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite

This book reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis.

Katherine Kearns (Author)

9780521444859, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 February 1994

246 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.48 kg

"[Kearns's] study throws usefully adversarial light on what she half-unwillingly acknowledges to be the 'odd magic' of his poetry." Tony Sharpe, Journal of American Studies

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminising of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatises as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations - to be manly and to be a poet - inform his entire poetics. Rather than approaching Frost's poetry with the methods and assumptions of deconstruction in mind, this book finds that Frost himself forces a deconstructive reading: his unstable ironies, his complexities and his manipulations of form are designed precisely to produce the conviction that any suggestion of significance is arbitrary and personal. The study unites biography, psychology and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: 'The Serpent's Tail'
1. Irony: 'Teiresia's Gaze'
2. Irony II: 'This Is Not a Pipe'
3. Women: 'Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives'
4. Eros: 'The Mischief Maker'
5. Prosody: 'White Noise'
6. Lyricism: 'At the Back of the North Wind'
Conclusion: 'Out Far and in Deep'
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]