Synopses & Reviews
Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminizing of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatizes as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations--to be manly and to be a poet--inform his entire poetics. The study unites psychobiographical and feminist approaches to create an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.
Review
"...the most stimulating work on Frost since Richard Poirier's; it revises much...Kearns stays close to the poems; she takes Frost on his own terms and is among his most generous and generative readers...Kearns's revisionist readings of major poems and her mimesis of Frost's pushing toward extremes and stopping short of them are exemplary. This is first-rate work." Guy Rotella, New England Quarterly
Review
"[Kearns's] study throws usefully adversarial light on what she half-unwillingly acknowledges to be the 'odd magic' of his poetry." Tony Sharpe, Journal of American Studies
Synopsis
This book reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: 'The Serpent's Tail'; 1. Irony: 'Teiresia's Gaze'; 2. Irony II: 'This Is Not a Pipe'; 3. Women: 'Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives'; 4. Eros: 'The Mischief Maker'; 5. Prosody: 'White Noise'; 6. Lyricism: 'At the Back of the North Wind'; Conclusion: 'Out Far and in Deep'; Notes; Index.