Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift : Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

In Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis to well over one hundred of Frost’s lyrics, considering each poem as integral to the poet’s singular “constellation of intention.” Beyond biography, this book offers extended, close readings of Frost’s 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 modernism’s 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. Frost’s version of pastoral represents no escape from life’s stresses, but the most constructive and life-sustaining means to address life’s struggles ‘head on’: that is (as Frost declared) to “take life by the throat” in song in order to ‘see what we’re made of.’

A revaluation of Frost’s major lyrics, this book makes a case for Frost as America’s preeminent philosophical poet. The unfortunate effect of Frost’s 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 isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t 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 ‘consideration’s’ 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.”