A New Quest in Frost and Eliot Poems

A quest is a journey, an adventure, seeking or looking for something that you feel there is a need to find. Robert Frost's "Directive" and T.S. Eliot`s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are poems of quest. Both men have chosen different quests for their poems. Quest that they feel the reader needs to seek out and become aware of. As there is a quest, there is also something that they want the reader to not be aware of. Thus going away from the quest, toward a new direction.

Both authors were going through different stages in their lives and were having different problems when they wrote these poems. Frost, a very depressed figure dealt with a lot of tragedy in his lifetime. It seemed as if all that were around him family wise, died leaving him lonely and depressed. This explains the gloominess in his poems and also hints towards why he sets out the quest in "Directive." He wrote a lot dealing with nature. His poems were realistic and not of love and romantic setting. "Directive" is said to be Frost's most major poem. It is out of his 1947 publishing, Steeple Bush (Pritchard, Oxford University Press). Eliot, the opposite of Frost was a religious man. He wasn't depressed. His poems were more about love with a romantic feel unlike Frost's. Which too helps to depict his quest.

His style didn't change till the 1920's when he took up his jazz like form and he became greatly influenced by the postwar and the death of his close friend, Jean Verdenal, who died in the battle of Dardenelles. Eliot dedicated "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Verdenal (Garraty & Carnes, Oxford University Press).

The quest Frost sets out for us in "Directive" is to help one to connect with their lost childhood. He gives direction and instruction on how he feels the reader is to do so. He wants the reader to get lost, in order to really find himself or herself. He tries to put the reader on a course.

In the first nine lines he beings to set the path.

"Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm