'The prophet of disaster': Robert Frost, 'Steeple Bush,' and the nuclear age

Robert Frost's Steeple Bush (1947) is considered as a passionate protest against nuclear proliferation in this century and as one of the earliest examples of poetic discourse on the topic. Stylistic differences of the poems from his earlier work result from Frost's forced reappraisal of his nature philosophy in light of the advent of the atomic bomb, to which several of the poems refer directly. Reviewing Frost's early grounding in European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and comparing his expression of his philosophy in poems from before and after the bombing of Hiroshima, this thesis attempts to reassess Steeple Bush as both a work of poetry and a political document. Frost's letters and increasing politicization after World War II are used as tools for the evaluation of the post-nuclear poems. "Directive" is considered as a transitional poem: a valediction to his previous position that man is not so separate from nature as man believes and an affirmation that, separate from nature, man cannot long continue.