Robert Frost and the Feminine Literary Tradition

In spite of Robert Frost's continuing popularity with the public, the poet remains an outsider in the academy, where more "difficult" and "innovative" poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are presented as the great American modernists. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition considers the reason for this disparity, exploring the relationship among notions of popularity, masculinity, and greatness. Karen Kilcup reveals Frost's subtle links with earlier "feminine" traditions like "sentimental" poetry and New England regionalist fiction, traditions fostered by such well-known women precursors and contemporaries as Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She argues that Frost altered and finally obscured these "feminine" voices and values that informed his earlier published work and that to appreciate his achievement fully, we need to recover and acknowledge the power of his affective, emotional voice in counterpoint and collaboration with his more familiar ironic and humorous tones.