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University of Southern Mississippi

Why I Killed the Draft Horse: The Golden Bough, Robert Frost, and "Progress"

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

<p>The absence of criticism on Robert Frost's "The Draft Horse" suggests that it is a challenge to Frost scholarship. This reading views Frost's strange and neglected poem as a return to a monomyth offered by James Frazer's hugely influential <em>The Golden Bough</em>. In "The Draft Horse," Frost reconsiders the concept of ceremonial sacrifice that undergirds Frazer's encyclopedic study of world culture and, by performing ceremony as a kind of modem poesis, Frost complicates the hero/sacrificial object role and critiques the progressive ideology that grounds Frazer's account to fashion a troubling epic for modern America that implicates its national readers in a kind of savagery. </p>

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Arts (MA)
Level thesis:degree_level
Masters Thesis
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
English
Year dc:date.available
2013

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Boyle, Eugene Charles McGregor, III
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Jonathan Barron
  • Martina Sciolino
  • Charles Sumner

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Repository record dc:identifier
https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/409
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-1485

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
University of Southern Mississippi
Base URL
aquila.usm.edu/do/oai/
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Boyle, Eugene Charles McGregor, III. Why I Killed the Draft Horse: The Golden Bough, Robert Frost, and "Progress". Masters Thesis thesis, 2013. https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/409