Robert Frost Naturalist, Spiritual Drifter and Pragmatic Empiricist (Published)
A Four-time winner of the Pulitzer prize for poetry, Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) created a new poetic language that has a deep and timeless resonance. His poems include dramatic dialogues and narratives–stories of farmers and their families, farm workers and villagers, poems of joys and tragedies, written in a language, like wordsworth’s language “everyday language”, without sentimentality or melodrama. The simple images and themes of Frost’s poems are interwoven into a complex pattern of provocative idea and observations. Any poem by Frost is an act of interpretation, an inquiry into the resources of the language it can make available to itself. His poetry of work is quite directly about the correlative work of writing a poem and of reading it. Any intense labor enacted in his poetry, like “mowing”, or “apple picking”, “Mending wall”, can penetrate to the visions, dreams, myths that are at the heart of reality, constituting its articulate form. Manual labor in frost’s poetry is often an image of the effort to penetrate matter. Several of Frost’s poems sprang from his own experiences. “Storm Fear” for example, is about the frightening, trapped feeling of being snowed in. The elation and hope that come with spring are evident in “To the thawing wind”, which is an incantation. Sound and metaphor in Frost’s poetry are a source of energies, not signs of meaning ultimately to be enforced. It is not necessary, even of it had been possible, to deal with all Frost’s poems in this paper. Instead, besides the topics discussed above, I chose poems which, are relevant to the subject matter of this paper, and I mentioned other poems by passing. The main subjects that this paper tried to tackle and discuss are: Frost’s theory of poetry and its application, the naturalist, the spiritual drifter, and the pragmatic empiricist.
Keywords: Empiricist, Naturalist, Pragmatic, Robert Frost, Spiritual
EXPLORATION OF THE CONCEPT OF “I” IN WALT WHITMAN’S SONG OF MYSELF (Published)
This research is an attempt to study the concept of “I” in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. His Song of Myself offers an insight into Whitman’s quest for the self-discovery. According to Whitman, it is nothing else but the other name of a journey that is interpreted as a movement from “intrapersonal” to “interpersonal” and finally leading to “transpersonal”. For Whitman, it is not something static rather an ongoing process. It is a universal phenomenon extended to the whole humanity. I have tried to classify this journey of selfhood into four stages. In the first stage, he becomes conscious of his self; in the second stage, his concept of the self develops to include the souls of all men; in the third stage, it embraces God and in the fourth stage, the entire universe. Walt Whitman seems to be toiling extremely hard to make his readers, his companions. So that they can experience exactly what Whitman has experienced, so that the difference between “I” and “you” could be blurred. Walt Whitman, in fact, invites others to the journey of selfhood. “Song of Myself” envisions the “I” enraptured by senses, embracing all people and places from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. More central to his transpersonal flight is the view of the poem as a means of expressing his “self” in universal terms. A cosmic consciousness manifests and Whitman’s imagination is finally attuned with the infinite. And when the depth of this realization is achieved, there is an onset of fervent understanding.
Keywords: Quest, Self, Spiritual, self-discovery