The Frost in Faulkner: Walls and Borders of Modern Metaphor

Abstract

My paper discusses the dialogue between Robert Frost’s verse and William Faulkner’s works: from the first poems he published as a young writer, especially in his debut volume The Marble Faun (1924), to The Hamlet (1940), an acknowledged novel of maturity. Three world-famous poems: “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” will represent here Frost’s metaphorical counterpart. The allegorical borders thus crossed are those between Frost’s lyrical New England setting and the Old South of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha diegesis; between (conventional patterns of) Romanticism and Modernism – in both writers’ cases; between poetry and prose; between “live metaphor” and “emplotment” (applying Paul Ricoeur’s theory of “semantic innovation”); between (other conventional patterns of) regionalism and (actual) universality. Frost’s uniqueness among the American modern poets owes much of its vital energy to his mock-bucolic lyrical settings, with their dark dramatic suggestiveness. In my paper I hope to prove that Frost’s lesson was a decisive inspiration for Faulkner, himself an atypical modern writer. If Faulkner’s fiction is pervaded by poetry, this is so because he saw himself as a “poet among novelists.” Faulkner actually started his career under the spell of Frost’s verse – at least to the same extent to which he had once emulated the spirit of older and remoter poets, such as Keats or Swinburne.

Keywords

• walls – borders
• romanticism – modernism
• regionalism – universality