Lessons from Fire and Ice, Soldier's Home, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, and Sunday Morning
Grasping for stability on the face of a chaotic universe, modernist writers believed that the traditional assumptions about family, war, society, and religion were no longer valid. Before, during, and after World War I, the modernists displayed the influences of scientific revolutions, familial upheaval, social reform, and philosophical questions. Religion was particularly decimated by the ravages of questioning. This central motivating factor of not only the United States, but the entire world, was intensely scrutinized and oftentimes abandoned by the modernists, and criticism, abandonment, and reconstruction of religion are evident in selected works of Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and Wallace Stevens. Frost flippantly scoffs at doomsday predictions in "Fire and Ice." In contrast to Frost's assertion of the power of the individual against scientific prediction and religious prophecy, Harold Krebs folds under his family's religious pressure in Hemingway's "Soldier Home." Alienated from both her family and society, Granny Weatherall tries to use Roman Catholicism as a ticket to Heaven in Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," but she realizes the pointlessness of this goal on her deathbed. As a culmination of the underlying implications of modernist thought, Wallace Stevens embraces a new religious order in "Sunday Morning." As opposed to a transcendent and unseeable yearning for the afterlife, Modernism presents the option of a new faith in the power of natural and secular reality.
In a few succinct and profound lines, Robert Frost alludes to two predominant theories of world destruction in "Fire...
... middle of paper ...
... and Ice," "Soldier's Home," "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," and "Sunday Morning," for the relevance of the these works has not diminished over time. With profound insight and acute introspection, the modernists urge the reader to question the validity of traditional religion, and their disillusioned, alienated, and experimental voices do not soothe the individual into complacency and stagnation. Unsettled and possibly uprooted, a reader must then reevaluate his or her own spiritual odyssey.
Works Cited
Frost, Robert. "Fire and Ice." McQuade 2: 1256.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Soldier's Home." McQuade 2: 1159-63.
McQuade, Donald, et al. ed. The Harper American Literature. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Porter, Katherine Anne. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." McQuade 2: 1056-62
Stevens, Wallace. "Sunday Morning." McQuade 2: 1273-76.
Frost, Robert. "Mending Wall." Responding to Literature. 2nd Ed. Ed. Judith A. Stanford. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co. 1996. 1212-1213.
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan et al. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 695-696. Print.
Bolivar illustrates the relationship between the Spanish American colonies and Spain. The relationship could be described as bitter, at least in the eyes of the Spanish colonies. Inferiority led the Spanish colonies to the ideas of revolution. Although their rights come from the Europeans, they do not acknowledge themselves as Europeans or Indians. The people of the Spanish colonies claim to be, according to Bolivar, “[…] a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of [America] and the Spanish usurper” (411). “Usurpers” meaning a position that is held by forces which entails an unwanted or uninvited relationship. It is because of the Europeans, as stated by Bolivar, that “we have to assert [European] rights against the rights of the natives, and at the same time we must defend ourselves against invaders [which] places us in a most extraordinary and involved situation” (411). This is also evidence of a bitter rela...
McQuade, Donald, ed. The Harper American Literature. Harper & Row Publishers: New York, 1987, pp. 1308-1311. This paper is the property of NetEssays.Net Copyright © 1999-2002
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Robert Frost’s dramatic poem Home Burial depicts two tragedies: the loss of an infant and the deterioration of a marriage that follows. The emotional dialogue characterizes husband and wife with their habits of speech, illustrating the ways that they deal with grief. Instead of comforting her in her distress, the husband attempts at every turn to force his wife to cease grieving. The unnamed farmer’s inability to console his wife, who seems to feel so much more deeply the loss of her child, combined with her inability to see any feeling at all in her husband’s actions, contribute to a conflict that seems unresolvable by the end of the poem. But Frost’s diction suggests that it is the husband’s style of communication, not his method of grieving, that is the true cause of the vast distance between the two.
In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” she uses the structure of her poem and rhetoric as concrete representation of her abstract beliefs about death to comfort and encourage readers into accepting Death when He comes. The underlying theme that can be extracted from this poem is that death is just a new beginning. Dickinson deftly reassures her readers of this with innovative organization and management, life-like rhyme and rhythm, subtle but meaningful use of symbolism, and ironic metaphors.
Perkins, Geroge, and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
Perkins George, Barbara. The American Tradition in Literature, 12th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
Dickinson 's poem uses poetic devices of personification to represent death, she represents death as if it were a living being. Dickinson 's capitalization of the word “DEATH”, causes us to see death as a name, in turn it becomes noun, a person, and a being, rather than what it truly is, which is the culminating even of human life. The most notable use of this, is seen in the very first few lines of the poem when Dickinson says “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me”. In her poem Dickinson makes death her companion, as it is the person who is accompanying her to her grave. She states that death kindly stopped for her and she even goes as far as to give death the human ability to stop and pick her up. The occasion of death through Dickinson use of personification makes it seem like an interaction between two living beings and as a result the poem takes on a thoughtful and light hearted tone. The humanization of death makes the experience more acceptable and less strange, death takes on a known, familiar, recognizable form which in turn makes the experience more relatable. As the poem
...ed by many scholars as his best work. It is through his awareness of the merit, the definitive disconnectedness, of nature and man that is most viewable in this poem. Throughout this essay, Frosts messages of innocence, evil, and design by deific intrusion reverberate true to his own personal standpoint of man and nature. It is in this, that Frost expresses the ideology of a benign deity.
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.
Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” allows readers to consider the devastation that parents experience when they lose a child. “Home Burial” captures the differences in the ways people deal with loss and grief. Munaza Hanif, Anila Jamil, and Rabia Mahmood also analyze this fascinating poem in their paper, “AN ANALYSIS OF HOME BURIAL (1914) BY FROST IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE” for its representation of people and their grief. Hanif, Jamil, and Mahmood’s analysis of Amy’s psychological breakdown displays how she and her husband’s lack of communication leads to the death of the marriage.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views; Robert Frost First Edition, New York et al, Chelsea House Pub., 1986.
Robert Frost, known for being a Modernist American poet was said to have hidden the pain of his private life through his writing career. He shared many ideas and was barely given credit for any of it during his lifetime. However, the nation mourned when “the most beloved poet of the century” passed away. (Greiner 94-95). After his death, the nation was then able to study and understand Frost’s life and the reasoning behind his poetry. Frost was set on making a difference in poetry as he once expressed, “I expect to do something to the present state of literature in America” (Greiner 95). The poem, “Putting in the Seed” written by Frost himself, expresses one of his common themes in his poems, nature. Being recognized as an American poet till after death, Frost has impacted poetry in a way that may not exist if it was not for him. Throughout his life he overcame many hardships through writing, which he used as therapy. This astounding author left the impression of creativity at its finest.