로버트 프로스트의 실용주의적 모더니즘과「가족묘」

Abstract

Jihee HanGenerally, Robert Frost is known as a nature poet who described rural landscapes of New England province, a folk poet who represented lives of ordinary American people with a simple, vernacular language, and a popular poet who offered readers the message of hope and courage, sugar-coated with simple folk wisdom. Nonetheless, the popularity of Frost has also drawn some negative critical responses from literary scholars. Comparing him with other modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, they have indicated that Frost lacked a serious philosophical and religious meditation of life. Therefore, in this essay I will discuss Frost’s “Sound of Sense” poetics in terms of Henry Bergson and William James and try to examine his discrete poetic search to reflect the human consciousness that is constantly in flux. Then, reading “Home Burial,” I will look into how realistically Frost controls the ‘sound’ of the simple, ordinary dialogue in order for readers to engage the ‘sense,’ that is, the deeper and more dynamic psychological realities of modern Americans. Re-examining Frost’s “Sound of Sense” poetics by way of discussing the very tricky issue of ‘when and how to talk about death,’ I hope to illuminate Frost as a serious modernist poet, who maintained a mature critique of the deep chasm between the appearance of the way the people exist and the real nature of their existence.