Robert Frost And Eliot

ln perceiving the 'pastoral' T S Eliot and Robert Frost are alike. Both of them assume a world composed oI isolated levels of being, and thus both tend to see experience and portray it as a totality of sharply ditferinO contexts. Where Frost iuxtaposes rural and urban life, the regional and the cosmopolitan, the human and the natural, Eliot contrasts the social classes and holds up disparate historicel periods for comparison. ln Frosts' poetry the regional world is kept quite separate froni the everyday life of urban sociely, and nature lrom the level of human experience, yel the separate contexts though never allowed to merge, are held together by. the contrasl between them, which creates a conslant reference from one to another and an awareness of ironic parallels. Frost is an intellectual as well as chronological contemporary o, the symbolist poets and this pastoral mode, while leading to a kind of poetry quite ditferent from that of symbolism, belongs in the same chapter of literary history. ln his pastorals, Frost's dominant motive is to reasserl the value oI individual perception against the fragmenting of experience resulting from modern technology. They deal with one ol the most fundamental concerns oi the 20th century thought. Frost's solution to lhis problem involves a withdrawal from the modern city to an agrarian world which belongs to the past. He has in eflect found a retreat in one of those out of the way places when technology has not yet complicated life by separating man from the land. But this retreat ls of a special sort. He does not turn his back on the world of today nor does he advocate a return to the soil. 

There is in his regionalism no call Ior action or program for social reform, and as a matter oJ ract he insists over and over again that no program will ever resolve lhe basic conflicts in human life. His withdrawal must be distinguished from agrarianism. lt is the adopting of an artistic perspeclive. Lionell Trilling could find a dominant quality of terror in Frosts' poetry......" I think ol robert Frosl as a terrifying poet.....The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe. The people of Frost's poems have done that with a vengeance. ln the interests of what great other thing these people have made this reiection we cannot know for certain. But we can guess that it was in the interest ol truth, of some truth of the sell. They aflirm this oI themselves, that they are what they are, that this is their truth and that if the truth be bare, as truth often is, it is far better than a lie. For me the process by which . they arrive at that truth is always terrifying". Frost's poetry retlects modern life. Frost does not depict the outward events and conditions, but the central facts of 20th century experience, the uncertainty and painful sense of loss are there and seem if anything more bleakly apparent in that their social and economic manifestations have been stripped away. The terror Frost expresses is the terror which comes and must come with the birth of something new. lt is the mark of a genuinely modern.poetry. Frost's view of conceptualizing and the role of symbols in human life reflects important strands o, thought in modern philosophy, anthropology and psychology. The kind il poeiry Frost writes can be best understood by observing the method  by which he has sought to make the present moment represent all other times, and the particular place he describes, the human situation it has always existed. His essenlial technique is that of pastoral. He has explained wide and manifold ranges of being by viewing reality within the mirror of the natural and unchanging world of rural life.