"Though Mr. Francis lacks the gritty muscularity of Robert Frost, he can stand side by side with the elder poet as an exponent of pantheistic serenity"
My reactions to this critical comment are that I am confused about the "gritty muscularity" that Robert Frost has. In his poems that I have read, I have encountered little grittiness or muscles. In "The Road Not Taken", Frost ponders his choice and how it will affect him, in a weary, sympathetic, and reminiscent way.
" the word road is misused. The correct word would have been path. And here the Abiding Mystery makes its cultural presence and meaning felt; for road is, etymologically speaking, a synecdoche for the way traveled by carts, cars, chariots, by anything advancing by means of wheels. My point is that the Cultural Unconscious equates road with rota (Latin, wheel). The word path on the other hand, from Old English paeth (cognate to Latin "pes," which means foot, step, pace), would oppose the idea of advancing by foot to that of advancing by wheel"
I disagree with this comment. I feel that the critic is reading to literally, and needs to open their mind to see the figurative meanings of words and phrases. To me, the word path would not fit, because it is too personal and unrelatable to the reader. A road is travelled on by multiple people, just as multiple people face life-altering decisions every day.
"Frost's penchant for problematizing simple language with ambivalence is rivaled by none but a few of his modernist contemporaries, as this quatrain demonstrates"
Although Frost's sentence structure, meter, and vocabulary are simple, the meaning extracted from the poem is far greater.
My reactions to this critical comment are that I am confused about the "gritty muscularity" that Robert Frost has. In his poems that I have read, I have encountered little grittiness or muscles. In "The Road Not Taken", Frost ponders his choice and how it will affect him, in a weary, sympathetic, and reminiscent way.
" the word road is misused. The correct word would have been path. And here the Abiding Mystery makes its cultural presence and meaning felt; for road is, etymologically speaking, a synecdoche for the way traveled by carts, cars, chariots, by anything advancing by means of wheels. My point is that the Cultural Unconscious equates road with rota (Latin, wheel). The word path on the other hand, from Old English paeth (cognate to Latin "pes," which means foot, step, pace), would oppose the idea of advancing by foot to that of advancing by wheel"
I disagree with this comment. I feel that the critic is reading to literally, and needs to open their mind to see the figurative meanings of words and phrases. To me, the word path would not fit, because it is too personal and unrelatable to the reader. A road is travelled on by multiple people, just as multiple people face life-altering decisions every day.
"Frost's penchant for problematizing simple language with ambivalence is rivaled by none but a few of his modernist contemporaries, as this quatrain demonstrates"
Although Frost's sentence structure, meter, and vocabulary are simple, the meaning extracted from the poem is far greater.