Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite

Description

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminising of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatises as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations - to be manly and to be a poet - inform his entire poetics. Rather than approaching Frost's poetry with the methods and assumptions of deconstruction in mind, this book finds that Frost himself forces a deconstructive reading: his unstable ironies, his complexities and his manipulations of form are designed precisely to produce the conviction that any suggestion of significance is arbitrary and personal. The study unites biography, psychology and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.

"...the most stimulating work on Frost since Richard Poirier's; it revises much...Kearns stays close to the poems; she takes Frost on his own terms and is among his most generous and generative readers...Kearns's revisionist readings of major poems and her mimesis of Frost's pushing toward extremes and stopping short of them are exemplary. This is first-rate work." Guy Rotella, New England Quarterly "[Kearns's] study throws usefully adversarial light on what she half-unwillingly acknowledges to be the 'odd magic' of his poetry." Tony Sharpe, Journal of American Studies