소로우와 프로스트 - 자연과 상상어

Abstract

Unlike such modernist poets of urbanity as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Robert Frost became known as a traditional poet of nature. The key to Frost's nature poetry is his close affinity with Thoreau's view of language. Inherited from Emerson with a strong sense of a correspondence between nature and language, Thoreau insisted in Walden that every natural fact is a symbolic language nutritious for spiritual growth. He hoed beans, for example, not because he believed in the material economy of beans but “for the sake of tropes and expression" of spirit. Reading classics is necessary for the growth of spirit. Consequently Thoreau emphasizes in “Reading” the importance of written language: “It is not enough to be able to speak the language...for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.” But in “Sounds” he points to the danger of reading only written languages by saying that “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor.” The crucial question of vision that he poses his audience is: “Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?”The “seer” must be able to see physical reality accurately, but also to “see” or contemplate through mind's eyes the symbolic spiritual meanings contained in natural facts. These facts comprise the poetic language of imagination, which is above the spoken and written languages of culture. Thoreau came to Walden woods to “see” the imagined language for the cure of his neighbors' spiritual diseases. Frost came to the rural landscape of New England to find the poetic language of imagination to substitute his competitors' culture-encrusted languages. Frost's nature poetry, as we see in his “The Pasture,” should be read as a “little calf” fetched from the pasture to his home.