• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.31
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• pp.95-118
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• 2013

Robert Frost's poetry has generally been considered fairly readable partly because of the simplicity or down-to-earth-ness of the messages that go along with the poet's projected public image and the 'traditional' forms he used. Against the grain of such general perception, this study reads some of the early poems of Robert Frost to re-characterize the beginning of the poet's career as a modernist attempt to challenge the dominant poetic conventions of the time: the genteel conventions. In reading the poems, this study focuses on frost's strategic method of using the speaker or persona regarding the delivery of meanings. Those readers who would like to find the immediate presence of Frost's voice in the poems, fail to distinguish the speaker and the poet, readily accepting the face value of what the speaker tries to convey: those messages which are in line with liberal individualism, like self-reliance, autonomous self, work ethics, etc. Frost's speakers, however, are rarely the mouthpiece of the poet himself. Rather, they are fictional characters who, while on the surface of the text appear to be hammering out a stable theme out of their everyday experience, under a heuristic scrutiny of the textual structure, turn out to be undermining the logic or the rationality of the theme, which can be identified as a modernist textual strategy that challenges the traditional conventions regarding the stability of meaning in a poetic text.