Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin | 
| Author: Robert Faggen
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
Buy Used: $53.88
Used (4) from $53.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 4491144
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 363
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 0472107828
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.52
EAN: 9780472107827
ASIN: 0472107828
Publication Date: May 1997
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin gives us a new and compelling portrait of the poet-thinker as a modern Lucretius--moved to examine the questions raised by Darwin, and willing to challenge his readers with the emerging scientific notions of what it meant to be human.
Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost's poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost's reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau, through James and pragmatism. He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost's shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man's relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.
The book shows that Frost was neither a pessimist lamenting the uncertainties of the Darwinian worldview, nor a humanist opposing its power. Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science, and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression, but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry, but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.
"A forceful, appealing study of the Frost-Darwin relation, which has gone little noted by previous scholars, and a fresh explanation of Frost's ambivalent relation to modernism, which he scorned but also influenced" --William Howarth, Princeton University
Robert Faggen is Associate Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College and Adjunct Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate School.
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| Customer Reviews:
An insightful study October 24, 2001
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book helped me see Frost in a new light, as a thinker grappling with the problems science poses to religion and to poetry. There is an enormous amount of scholarship brought to many poems, and we see the ways Frost thought not only about Darwin but about Lucretius, Milton, James, Bergson, Emerson, and Thoreau. The Frost that emerges is both dark and complex--a subversive and subtle pastoralist. Though the book is written in clear prose with very little jargon, it is a heavy read. But well worth it.
Faggen's Masterful Study June 22, 2001
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
Professor Faggen has written a remarkable book. We might have considered Frost a sentimental, a provincial poet, but in this volume we discover that Frost (far from the potato-hoeing grandpa of our collective memories) is a poet of the first order and among the most challenging of the moderns. Frost's revaluations of the Romantic and the Miltonic myths in Darwinian terms place him as our chief poet of the scientific, the skeptical turn of mind. The evidence amassed for his argument is daunting and Faggen has contributed to our understanding of the place of Darwin--biological and social--in modern poetry. Faggen's individual readings are acute and original. We will from now on see "The Road Not Taken," "The Oven Bird," and "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," in a different way. We will see them not as melancholy mood poems, but as tough and riddling explorations of human and animal existence. We may now begin to see Frost's place in American literature, and that a high position indeed! We may thank Robert Faggen for deepening our understanding and broadening our view.
An essential, ground-breaking study. October 26, 1998
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
Many books and articles have been written about the poetry of Robert Frost, but this book, astonishingly, makes almost all of them obsolete. Frost's critics have found him haunted by a dark vision but they have been hard pressed to say exactly what it was. They have struggled to find the real context of his thinking, but the poems, in spite of many melancholy readings, have remained elusive. What are these elegant meditations really about? Where does the impetus for these disturbing dramatic monologues and stark dialogues come from? Faggen's brilliantly researched and forcefully written book finally tells us the answer: Frost was obsessed with Darwin and his vision of the natural world. He said so many times (though none of his critics was willing to listen). And once you have recognized this fact, the grave, witty, tender, and frightful poems acquire a new clarity and force. Frost was no "spiritual drifter," no vague perveyor of "metaphysical terror," as earlier writers have thought, but the most sophisticated and tough-minded poet of science that modern culture has produced--the nearest thing we have to a Lucretius. This book takes a figure who has seemed conservative or even backward to his readers and shows him to be the most forward-looking artist of his generation. And it accomplishes this task with an easy mastery of detail that removes all doubt. "Never again would bird's song be the same," Frost wrote--never the same after reading Darwin, that is, nor will this poem be the same after reading Faggen. The romantic Frost is dead, and a new Frost is afoot. Some will mourn, some will rejoice at the news, but scholarship is seldom as conclusive as this and hardly ever as exciting.
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