26 Jan Does Frost embody both American

American Literature

Week 7 Discussion

DQ1 Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson

Instructions

Masters and Robinson can work very well in a survey course of American literature as transition figures from the local color regionalism of the late nineteenth century to the modernism of the early twentieth century. Masters and Robinson write about the daily lives of ordinary people from the Midwest and New England, respectively, as did their local color forebears. But what Masters and Robinson add to literary history is the sense of alienation, isolation, and despair that becomes increasingly central to modernist literature. Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, from which the poems in NAAL are taken, is a collection of more than two hundred poems about the deceased residents of the fictional midwestern town of Spoon River. The poems read like the epitaphs of people with folksy names like Ollie McGee and Constance Hatley, but these rural folk all took to their grave secrets of suffering and loss. Similarly, Robinson’s poems about provincial Maine present us with men and women of limited education and experience with the larger world, but the afflictions (both physical and psychological) they suffer from are emblematic of the human condition as we enter the modern era.

Discuss one of the following in 250 words or more by Thursday at 11:55 pm. Then respond to your classmate in 150 words or more by Saturday at 11:55 pm EST.

What is your response to the voices of the dead in Masters’s poems? (p. 24, brief biography; p. 25-27)

Do the speakers in these dramatic monologues remind you of events in today’s news? Support your analysis with examples from his poems.

Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy” and “Mr. Flood’s Party” are poems about alcoholics and their reasons (or excuses) for drinking.

Are they reasons or excuses?

In other words, does the nostalgia in each poem suggest a deep tragedy that these characters, in true naturalistic fashion, cannot escape?

Or does the nostalgia turn out to be a pretext for the drinking?

Does each poem serve, in some manner, as a commentary on the other?

Post your responses to these questions in 250 words or more in the Discussion thread by Friday and respond to one classmate by Saturday.

DQ2 Robert Frost

Proposition

Like Cather, Frost retains elements of realism, and like her, he portrays moments in which his speaker’s changes in perception are central to his poetry. Several class periods can be spent on individual poems and representative poems by other twentieth-century poets through the fulcrum of an analysis of Frost. You can prepare for a discussion of “The Oven Bird” by reading “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” with its allusion to Eden and human mortality. “The Oven Bird” deserves an important place in our discussion, because Frost’s other poems, his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” many other works of literature by modern writers, and even the concept of modernism itself seem contained and articulated in the poem’s last two lines: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.” The bird and the poet ask questions that express the central modernist theme: How do we confront a world in which reality is subject to agreement or lacks referentiality altogether? How do we express the experience of fragmentation in personal and political life? How do we live with the increasing awareness of our own mortality, whether we face the prospect of human death (as the speaker does in “Home Burial,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “‘Out, Out—’”), the death or absence of God (as Frost considers in “Desert Places” and “Design”), or mere disappointment at our own powerlessness (as in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”)?

Does Frost embody both American Dream and American Nightmare? You must respond in the Debate below, and post a reason for your response.

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