Robert Frosts poem The Road Not Taken has
the
simple, declarative sentences, regular meter, and ruralwe associate with his work.
The
complexity of the poem lies in the figurative meanings the reader brings
to it, since the
description itself is straightforward. Two roads diverged in
a wood and the poet, unable to
travel both (and doubting if he would ever
have the chance to return) took the one marginally
less traveled by. This has
made all the difference, though the reader is left to decide just
what the
difference is.
Emily Dickinson, a fellow New Englander, also
wrote
mainly in four-line stanzas, though the lines are shorter, pared down
to a few terse images.
Like Frost, Dickinson often wrote about the natural
world, but the tone is quite different,
mystical, and ecstatic, as in the
avian imagery of "Hope is a thing with
feathers."
Walt
Whitman was above all a city poet, celebrating the
magnificence and vibrancy
of his "high-masted Manhattan." His style of writing is very
different from
either Frost or Dickinson although, as with the latter, it takes only a glance
at
the page to discern who the poet mush be, before we have read a single
word. Whitman generally
writes in long, loose lines and is rhetorical and
theatrical in his style, often addressing the
reader directly and writing
about himself and his experience of life.
William
Carlos
Williams is perhaps the most difficult poet of the four to identify, since he writes in
a
wider range of styles than the others. His poems tend to be unrhymed and
are often without
formal meter. They often feature vivid concrete imagery and
visual description from which, as
with Frosts poems, the reader can
extrapolate differing ideas and
emotions.
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