Divergent Roads: Pre-Sublime Terror and Sublimated Tragedy in the Poetry of Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky

Not all great poetry produced in the first quarter of the twentieth century contains such stylistic elements as those metaphysical/modern ones evinced in the poetry of Eliot or other prototypical modernists: Robert Frost’s work, for example. It is true that Frost experiments with form and theme, as do Eliot and Pound, yet, on the whole, he does so in a way that does not sacrifice or sublime the imaginative strength or emotional complexity of his poetry to the Kantian recuperative shift of the imagination from pain to reason. While the prototypical modernists view what they consider to be the chaos of the twentieth century and encapsulate it within the safety of language, sublimating their emotional responses to the imaginative crisis by representing them in words, Frost takes what I am calling a pre-sublime stance and acknowledges the chaos by gesturing to it, thus refusing the comfort of reason. Rather than wrestling with an ontological crisis linguistically, Frost holds his reader at the moment of confrontation with eschatological terror. Among contemporary poets who could be called a latter-day modernist or sublimest is the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky, who came to Anglo-American literature through Donne, Eliot, Auden, and Frost. Although Brodsky’s poetry contains such prototypically modernist elements as the far-fetched comparison, pseudo-logic, and the amalgamation of disparate experiences, Brodsky claims Frost as his primary American anglophone source. My thesis will show how the metaphysical/modern paradigm provides a starting point from which Frost and Brodsky then diverge, and how Frost subsequently moves beyond crisis while Brodsky remains trapped within the safety of the intellect and the stasis of melancholia.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

Southwest Texas State University

Year dc:date.issued

1996

Author dc:creator

• Roth, Elizabeth Elam

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hansen, Mark B.N. (Mark Boris Nicola)

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Blanchard, Lydia
• Laird, Edgar

• Frost, Robert
• Brodsky, Joseph
• literary criticism and interpretation

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10877/21467

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digital.library.txst.edu:10877/21467