18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostA Time To Talk
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Between Movements
Frost, even as he explored the crazy kinetics of the London literary scene, knew he was a threshold figure, poised between the comforting, wise poetry of the hoary Gilded Age/Victorian poets and the cutting-edge experimental formalism of the emerging generation of smart, self-styled Modernists. Born within 10 years of Appomattox, Frost grew up studying the techniques, aural effects, and disciplined expression of the public poets of his time—his contemporaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant in America and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold in England. Their sculpted lines, defined by percussive rhythms and accessible rhyme schemes, explored Big Issues (like God, nature, the soul, and friendship) and offered inspirational advice to an emerging middle-class market of lightly educated readers. By temperament, however, Frost was a Modernist. In “Time to Talk,” for instance, the ring of untilled fields creates a disturbingly modern feeling of alienation amidst the otherwise homespun celebration of chit-chat.
Although he was more than 20 years older than the scrappy rebel-poets he first met when he expatriated to England (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, were born when Frost was nearly 20), Frost shared their existentialism and serio-comic pessimism over humanity’s chances given the post-apocalyptic feel in the uneasy interregnum between world wars.
Genre Context: Poems About Friendship
Although defining nearly two thousand years of poetry by subject matter is, of course, something of a parlor game (this poem about the death of a wife…is that about death or about love?), the genre of poems celebrating the value and virtue of friendship has come to represent a substantial sub-genre of poetry that includes not only the flourishing of so-called Hospitality Poetry that defined fin-de-siecle poetry in both Victorian England and Gilded Age America but also threads a line of poetry since Antiquity.
Poems about friendship are often relegated to second-tier work because most often the poems embrace the sheer joy of friendship without burdening such celebrations with irony. Poets as disparate as Shakespeare and William Blake, Waldo Emerson and Maya Angelou, Rudyard Kipling and William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have offered meditations on the value of friendship and the reassuring comfort from the company of others. In addition, in Frost’s own era, the rise of a literate middle class now with leisure time to read encouraged newspaper and magazine editors to publish poems that offered gentle wisdom about the rewards of friends. Some of the era’s most popular poets, most forgotten today, among them Ernest Lawrence Thayer, Edgar A. Guest, James Whitcomb Riley in America; John James Bezell, Thomas Cooper, and Joseph Skipsey in England, all penned odes to the beauty and resilience of friendship. Editors recognized the market value of poems that offered reader-friendly verse that, in turn, offered what are considered by contemporary readers low-octane cliches of friendship; how through thick and thin true friends abide, how friends maintain the generous spirit of support, encouragement, and unflagging love. This genre of touching and affirmative literature lends Frost’s poems its pedigree. In celebrating the approach of a friend coming down a country road and the promise of a simple chat, Frost draws on this genre of poetry.
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By Robert Frost
