There are reasons that the Lord of the Rings trilogy has spanned nearly one hundred years, allowing children to connect with their grandparents through their love of the tale, and that stories like Harry Potter have defined a generation: the story of a journey is one that audiences love to hear. Reading and watching about journeys can make the reader/watcher experience that journey with the characters. Journeys, however, do not have to be fantastical or magical to be powerful to a person. T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, for example, were both modernist poets, but they were creators of journeys that seemed much simpler. This is not to say, however, that the journeys they wrote of were incredibly similar. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” both depict in first-person form physical journeys by the speakers, through a city and through the woods, respectively, but also the metaphorical journey taken through life. The speakers of each of these poems are in different stages of their life-journeys, which provides them each with a different perspective. The speakers also have very different attitude to their journeys, showing that the stage and setting of a journey can greatly affect how that journey is perceived by the journeyer.
These poems have radically different settings, which sets the tone for each of the pieces. In Frost’s poem, the speaker finds himself one morning in a “yellow wood” (1), and no other people are apparently present. Both of the roads are “grassy” (8) and have “leaves no step had trodden black” (12), which implies that the roads are generally not traveled very frequently, and certainly not very recently. In Eliot’s poem, it is nighttime, which is likened to a “pat...
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...hoices, Eliot shows the opposite outcome of depression and regret from a lifetime of indecision. Whether it is a far-away land of fantastical beings, the woods down the street, or perhaps the nearest city, a journey will always yield a different experience, and indecision is just as much a decision as any other. Choosing to remain inactive in a world that calls for action is to choose to grow old and have nothing of substance to look back on, since nothing was ever done.
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Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken”. Baym 241-2.
Eliot, T.S.. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Baym 368-371.
Irwin, William. “Prufrock’s Question and Roquentin’s Answer.” Philosophy and Literature. Volume 33, No. 1 (April 2009): 184-92. Web. 5 May 2014.
Baym, N. (2007). he Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. A. New York: W. W. Norton.
Perkins, Geroge, and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
Baym, Nina et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995.
American Literature. 6th Edition. Vol. A. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. 783-791
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Perkins George, Barbara. The American Tradition in Literature, 12th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
Lawall, Sarah N. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
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McMichael, G., et. al., (1993) Concise Anthology of American Literature- 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
Baym, Franklin, Gottesman, Holland, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
Baym, Nina et al. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 8th ed. New York:
Literature is rarely, if ever, merely a story that the author is trying to tell. It is imperative that the reader digs deep within the story to accurately analyze and understand the message the author is trying to portray. Authors tend to hide themselves in their stories. The reader can learn about the author through literary elements such as symbolism, diction, and structure. A good example of this is Robert Frost’s poems The Road Not Taken and Nothing Gold can Stay in which he uses ordinary language unlike many other poets that became more experimental (Frost, Robert. “1.”).