“Robert Frost: Man and Nature Intertwined” by Phin Upham (Part 8)
This article appeared in full on SuperPhilosophy.com
Robert Frost’s view of man isolated and alone in nature is often disturbing. Even poems which are calm, are frightfully so. “Wood-Pile” reveals, for all its calmness, a mistrust of nature (the bird), the “hard” snow. But the ecological perspective that underlies the contrariety between man and nature does much to place man within nature rather than outside it. Man’s drive towards order, as conflicting with natures proclivity towards chaos are two sides of the same coin. Each requires and complements the other, actually without both of these forces neither could express itself. Much like the Manichaeanistic view of good and evil, man and nature are necessary unresolvable contraries. At the same time man, especially as the poet, with his ability to question and explore, is the ultimate culmination of nature, as Frost put it, the “height.” Nevertheless, Frost never tries to satisfy the reader as Wordsworth does. There is no higher power to join, no greater force to surrender ourselves to. Frost keeps man’s responsibilities squarely on man’s shoulders. It is this aspect of Frost especially that makes Frost so rewarding. He never flinches, he never bends. In “The Most Of It,” for example, Frost doubts God’s existence (“I thought the universe alone”) in the very first line, just as he often provisionally believes in God. There is, for Frost, a redemption that lies in the here and the now. There is a wonder for nature, a scientist’s tirelessness for observation that Frost sustains throughout his poetry. Perhaps Frost gives us no ultimate answers, as Wordsworth attempts, but he gives us something more concretely redeeming. A constant awareness and respect of our surroundings, an understanding of our place in them, and the freedom and joy that rests in the knowledge that not all answers are known or knowable, though we must struggle alone to find them.
About the Author
Phin Upham was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy, where he helped compile “Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy.” He graduated from the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania with a PhD in Applied Economics and works as an investor in New York City and San Francisco. Read more from SuperPhilosophy contributor Phin Upham.
