Robert Frost and the challenge of Darwin

Robert Frost's poetic development was challenged by the authority of science. The Darwinian revolution altered our understanding of "nature" and its use as a moral and spiritual authority. Finding himself writing in a romantic tradition of turning natural facts into symbols, Frost incorporated the consequences of the new biological consciousness into his own mythology. The result was a highly dramatic poetry, at once passionate and skeptical, of labor, domestication, and struggle.