A Cloud of Other Poets

This study indicates in key poems how and why Robert Frost was influenced by his Romantic predecessors -Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Seen in relation to their Romantic origins, many of Frost's poems, both those widely known and many less familiar, unfold to richer meanings. The author places the poetry of Frost in the context and tradition of the writings of these American and English Romantic writers and examines the variety of responses that Frost makes toward Romantic ideas on the mind, nature, and spiritual value. His kinship and differences with his forebears, who provide key images, figures, and symbols for his poems, indicate that Frost's poems prove to be a dialectic with his predecessors. The poems are to be seen from both a Romantic and anti-Romantic perspective. Contents: Emerson, Thoreau, and the English Romantics; The Visionary Mind; Wild FlowersThe Flowering Moment; The Darker Mood; The Visionary Quest; Poems of Diale Labor, Art, and Imagination; Four Poems of Origins and Ends.