"Eternal Freshness of the Flawless Poem:" Why Frost's Poetry Remains Vital Joseph Silver

In Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," from his book entitled New Hampshire, the poet descriptively evokes a bucolic New England winter ambience (which Frost knew quite intimately) and utilizes a simple narrative soliloquy centering around a rural traveler, who is "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a commonly understood and easily identifiable situation. These textual choices are employed for the purpose of subtly and cleverly articulating and arriving upon large-scale existential conclusions regarding the human condition. In this poem, which is described by Elizabeth Sergeant as "The most limpid and perfect of [Frost's] lyrics" (249), and which was written, as the poet himself explained "...in one stroke of the pen" (249), Frost utilizes language that is concurrently: simple and grandiose, surface-accessible and metaphorically rich, vague and specific, apathetic and emotion-laden, carefully articulated/witty and in layman's vernacular, and to the end, with flawless execution of what he describes as "...performance and prowess and feats of association."

Frost's utilizes language that is highly ambiguous while simultaneously densely...