A Proverbial Paradox: Language, Isolation, and Change in Robert Frost’s North of Boston

Year 2025, Issue: 4, 21 - 28, 28.01.2025

Dominic Richard

Abstract

This paper examines the use of proverbs in Robert Frost’s North of Boston. It engages with other scholars such as Robert Faggen and Timothy D. O’Brien and builds upon their work, arguing that not only does the use of proverbs act as a way of capturing the vernacular of the characters found in the poems, but that it also constitutes their paradox: the conflict and confrontation of traditional, communal wisdom against a new, evolving world and changing reality. As such, it touches on subject of miscommunication, exclusion, and isolation.

Keywords

proverbs, tradition, miscommunication, exclusion, isolation

References

• Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.
• Faggen, Robert. The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.
• Frost, Robert. North of Boston. New York: Henry Holt, 1917.
• ———. Selected Letters of Robert Frost. Ed. Lawrence Thompson. New York: Henry Holt, 1964.
• O’Brien, Timothy. Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• O’Donnell, William G. “Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation.” in Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. James Melville Cox. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 46-57.
• MacGowan, Christopher. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
• Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1988.
• “Proverb, n.” OED Online. July 2018. www.oed.com/view/Entry/153430. Accessed on 10 September 2024.
• Sheehy, Donald G. “‘What Became of New England?’: Frost and Rural Sociology.” in Robert Frost in Context. Ed. Mark Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 217–24.
• Sanders, David. “Frost’s North of Boston, its Language, its People, and its Poet.” in Critical Insights: Robert Frost. Ed. Morris Dickstein. New York: Salem Press, 2010. 95–109. Rotella, Guy. “Robert Frost and the Vestiges of Elegy.” Literary Imagination 14.1 (2012): 88–102.