Works Cited

1.       Diephouse, Dan. "The Economic Impulse In Robert Frost." Criticism 48.4 (2006): 477-507. Web. 2 Nov. 2013.

2.       Hinrichsen, Lisa. "A Defensive Eye: Anxiety, Fear And Form In The Poetry Of Robert Frost."Journal Of Modern Literature 31.3 (2008): 44-57. Web. 1 Nov. 2013.

3.       Barner, Ivan, William Burto and Willam E. Cain. Literature for Composition: An Introduction to Literature 10^th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print.

Historical Significance

“The Wood-Pile” by Robert Frost is important in history and in contemporary life because it is an example of Frost's dualism between being a classic poet and a modernist poet.  Frost was in many senses a classical poet, in his form and style.  Yet his content spoke of subjects such as nature and day to day life that could relate much more significantly to common people than most poetry of the previous era, making him one of the foremost poets of his day, and making this work part of a turning point in popular poetry. Frost wrote in a way that conveyed the economic situations of the time period in which he lived and he did it in an easily relate-able way.  Dan Diephouse discusses this in his article “The Economic Impulse in Robert Frost,” where he states “the pile of wood provides a medium of exchange between two minds that have never met, that share certain propensities and that perhaps disagree on others. (How could such a labor be forgotten about? But Frost, in empathy, provides the reason: he understands the workings of a mind that lives “in turning to fresh tasks.”).”  This quote is a good example of someone noting Frost’s duality, because it details how Frost relates it to the economic situation by being baffled at how someone could put labor into something like chopping firewood, and then merely waste all of that effort without reaping the rewards. Yet, at the same time he provides an excuse for it, saying that in going about their business whoever chopped the wood simply moved on to the next task without thinking about it.(Diephouse)

Author Background

Robert Frost had an interesting life.  Born in California, his family moved to New England when he was 11 due to the death of his father. In New England his mother supported them by teaching in a variety of schools.  Frost then proceeded to study at both Dartmouth and Harvard, two Ivy League schools, during his early adulthood.  Then, he began work as a farmer in New Hampshire while publishing various poems in small local papers. He then took a teaching job and worked there until 1912, when he moved to England with the idea of working on his writing in order to become a famous poet.  By 1915 he was already well known and decided to move back to the United States to once again live on a farm in New Hampshire, where he wrote much of his vast collection of famous poetry, and where he lived as a rural poet in order to find the inspiration for his nature themed writings. (Literature for Composition 10^th ed. 624)

Anxiety's role in "The Woodpile"

Lisa Hinrichson discusses anxiety's role in "The Woodpile" in this quote from her essay. “The measured step through the snow in the opening of “The Wood-Pile” serves to emphasize the balanced prepositions of the first line of the poem (“Out walking in”). This tension between order and disorder is keenly felt in “The Wood-Pile,” both in terms of the spatial order of the poem and the speaker’s unsteady emotional balancing.”  An example of the “unsteady emotional balancing” can be found in lines 7-10 of the poem, where the speaker describes the woods as follows, “Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.” The speaker here is clearly experiencing anxiety from the unfamiliar uniformity of his surroundings, however, the anxiety the speaker is feeling from the surroundings changes fundamentally with the introduction of the bird in Line 11.  The speaker projects his neuroticism onto the bird, and personifies it by imagining that the bird is attempting to defend a particular feather from the speaker.  By projecting the anxiety and fear onto the bird, it frees the speaker from anxiety in the following lines when the bird flies away, changing the tone of the speaker.(Hinrichson)

Introduction

“The Woodpile” by Robert Frost embodies themes of nature as well as decay, but if you look deeper there are undertones of anxiety and fear.  These tones are visible throughout the work, from the beginning when the narrator questions himself on whether or not to turn back, to his neurotic description of the bird in the poem.  The anxiety provides a different mood to a poem that otherwise would have been fairly standard.