Robert Frost Poetry Comparison

1104 Words5 Pages
A poet’s ability is not best judged on paper, but their skill in evoking emotion and encouraging contemplation within the reader. This being said, there are many ways to construe a text and with poems such as ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘Choose Something Like a Star’, the true meaning of the poem does not just lie within the words but is influenced by the reader’s context. Frost’s poetry is quite nonspecific and in that way rids the poem of his own personal baggage, its rather bare and the excellence of his words and phrases can only be appreciated once the reader’s own perspective has been cast upon it, layering it with their own meaning. Frost’s poems consist of understandable language that captures the thoughts of people who have a varied knowledge in literature, making him a feasible poetry study and one that I’m sure your students will come to love. A point of view in which ‘Fire and Ice’ can be interpreted as is completely literally. One of the first places we look for guidance when dealing with poetry are study guidelines. It is through the critical analysis of ‘Caitlin Vincent’, an editor at gradesaver.com that I have come to the understanding that ‘Fire and Ice’ could possible be bringing to question the geological Armageddon of the Earth. Frost brings in two possibilities for the world’s ultimate destruction to correspond directly to a common scientific debate during the time in which the poem was written. Vincent says that “some scientists believed that the world would be incinerated from its fiery core while others were convinced that a coming ice age would destroy all living things on the Earth’s surface.” Both referring to the ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ elements of the poem. When Frost repeats ‘some say’ when referring to the two beliefs, he has defined the two sides of the debate and it is believed that he is referring to the scientists involved in this
Open Document