프로스트 시와 스티븐스 시의 메타시학

Abstract

For Frost, poetry should be composed so sad and sincere and at the same time so happy in achievement. This poetic principle drives Frost to consciously design romantic sensibilities, a kind of emotional involvement in nature, and then transform its images into solid satisfaction in a sadness with systematic metaphors put in order of life. His poetry, especially the poems “The Oven Bird” (1916) and “Desert Places” (1936), does not just follow in the well known pattern of romantic woe or pleasure just as seen in poetry of William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frost rather strategically tries to allude such romantic poetry to what Edwin Arlington Robinson did with poetry in order to make a different form of poetry that looks sad and true to human life, yet carefully formed and worded: a metapoetic strategy by critically using related vocabulary at which he seems to excel to reflect on poetry and its own poetic program. In a different way from Frost, Stevens uses a new poetic program which is developed to design a “mock-judicious, mock-pompous setting of genteel debate,” such as seen in his poem, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923): “fun with the idea of an objective moral order possessed of religious authority” according to Milton J. Bates. Similarly, the poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1931) and “The Snow Man” (1931), get sometimes classified as one of Stevens’ “poems of epistemology,” yet it can be read as a system of related metaphors that are consciously and carefully used to allude the naturalistic skepticism that he absorbs from romantic sensibilities. In a style of the supreme fiction, his metapoetic strategy thus helps develop its different poetry of nature and life systematically with his multi-perspective positions -the perspectives that human imagination brings to “the nothing that is.”