About this item
Highlights
- Robert Frost was a practicing farmer, a skilled naturalist and one of America's best-loved poets.
- About the Author: Owen D.V. Sholes is a retired biology professor and the author of articles on ecology, environmental history, and the poetry of Robert Frost.
- 190 Pages
- Science, Natural History
Description
About the Book
""Robert Frost was a practicing farmer, a skilled naturalist and one of America's best-loved poets. This book pieces together Frost's environmental commentary, examining his poems thematically and in a logical order. Frost bemoaned the loss of people from the land but also celebrated the flora and fauna that thrived in fallow fields and empty barns"--Book Synopsis
Robert Frost was a practicing farmer, a skilled naturalist and one of America's best-loved poets. His body of work provides a vivid and compelling narrative of New England's changing environment--though it can be hard to discern when its parts are scattered through hundreds of different poems, voices and moods.
This book pieces together Frost's environmental commentary, examining his poems thematically and in a logical order. In them, homesteads are carved out of the forest, families make their living from an obdurate land, property is abandoned when it fails to sell, and plants and animals reclaim deserted farms.
Frost bemoaned the loss of people from the land but also celebrated the flora and fauna that thrived in fallow fields and empty barns.
Review Quotes
"Accessible for diverse audiences...a useful resource for new readers as well as those wishing to build on or further critique these works.... This work adds to, and strengthens, a growing literature on the similarities and the strengths of pairing poetry and science."-BioScience; "Sholes quite literally grounds Frost's poems in the natural and cultural landscapes that inspired them, letting readers know that his work is not simply a matter of pure metaphor, not amenable merely to context-free textual analysis, but is also about a real place with real ecological conditions and material characteristics...about real stone walls and real spring pools, not just ideas about such things. Readers who never considered that Frost himself might know something about ecology will have their eyes opened."-Kent C. Ryden, author Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England
About the Author
Owen D.V. Sholes is a retired biology professor and the author of articles on ecology, environmental history, and the poetry of Robert Frost. He lives in Rutland, Massachusetts.