| Robert Frost rarely attended any church, though biographers and critics establish his lifelong interest--even preoccupation--with questions of the spirit. In his own words, he "despised" religiosity, but considered himself a religious man. It is the purpose of this study to place the burden of clarifying Frost's intentions on his poetry. In what way does the poetry achieve, as he says, a "spiritual realization"? How is "the height of poetry" a spiritual activity?;Frost went to school to William James to confirm his belief that the most human act is also the most spiritual. One must have a belief and one must risk oneself strongly in belief. Reading William James validated for him the necessity of having a "vital option." The recurrent images of contention and struggle, identity and lack of identity, being at home and being lost, all establish the parameters of Frost's "vital option"--attaining a satisfactory spiritual belief.;Like James, Frost often used orthodox religious language and iconography, adding to them overtones of personal meaning. Both believed that the spiritual work, whatever else it might mean, begins here, in this world. One fulfills human potential while struggling against the limits of time and place. Frost's poetry was a way of demonstrating that "stating the spirit" involved a firm commitment to human experience.;In this study I examine how Frost's contrasting images--innocence versus experience, being lost or being found, having a home or not having one--address his concern with the "ultimate"--the spiritual difference that human purpose, love, and intention makes in the universe.;The greatest attempt that has ever failed, Frost said, is the attempt to say spirit in terms of matter. In Frost's poetry one discerns broad patterns and images that recur, notably those concerned with identity and home. The poems "Into My Own" and "Kitty Hawk" span a career in which Frost repeatedly returns to images of domesticity in order to explore the ways a person "makes a home" in the universe. The "Trial by Existence" demands that a person risk his spirit in life; at the same time, human need mandates that a person take steps, in Frost's words, to "make snug" in the limitless. For Frost, these twin tensions--risking and making snug--describe the spiritual venture. "God wants us to contend," Frost said; a person must explore himself and the universe while making himself an identity--"a place apart"--in the world. |
