Open AccessRobert Frost and the “Eye Reader”
Author(s) -
Jeremy Pomeroy
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
anglica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.101
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 0860-5734
DOI - 10.7311/0860-5734.28.1.08
Subject(s) - frost (temperature) , poetry , salient , feature (linguistics) , art , psychology , history , literature , philosophy , linguistics , geography , meteorology , archaeology
One salient feature of Robert Frost’s aesthetics was his sharp diff erentiation of the visual from the audile imagination. Frost (a former schoolteacher) had noticed the diff erence between visual and audile/phonetic readers, and considered the eye reader to be a ‘bad’reader. The article examines those features of Frost’s own poetic practice which would have led him to consider the eye reader a bad reader, as well as the sorts of prosodic content an eye reader may be prone to miss. Having examined Frost’s aesthetic objections to the eye reader, the question is then posed: does Frost ever treat the “eye reader,” or oralversus visual predilections, thematically in his artistic writings?