Frostにおける"Something" : 精神と現実の狭間での創造

Abstract

Robert Frost is often thought of as a pastoral poet who made his works through New England regional sceneries. It is true that he had a romantic feeling for the beautiful countryside and experiences in nature. It is dangerous, however, to see him only from the pastoral point of view because what he earnestly wanted to show us is the human conditions in the modern times. Thus, his pastoral world is supposed to be a fable which reflects a specimen of our modern plights and problems through metaphor. In making poetry he would presumably find the difficulty to convey all he had in his mind in language. Paring down his writing, he reached the point of the ineffable. He searched for an adequate way to break through the difficulty and to express his thought like an exclamation mark. His frequent use of the word, "something", gives us the key to understand his search for the strategy to transfer his private consciousness without losing its subtlety into his reader's mind.