Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost is often described as fusing the traditional poetic style of his 19th century predecessors with the innovation of his contemporaries. Frost, like Romantic poet William Wordsworth, focuses many of his poems on nature. A hallmark of Romantic poetry is its view on nature’s mutability, or the inevitability of change. Frost admired the use of fixed rhyme and meter of traditional poetry. He also revered the work of those Victorians, like Thomas Hardy, who turned an unsparing eye on the harsh realism of country life. With his focus on New England, Frost is considered an American regionalist and is particularly lauded for his ability to capture American idiom and dialect. Modernists often emphatically rejected elevated poetic diction to create more colloquial-sounding voices keeping with how people realistically spoke.

Unlike Frost, however, most Modernists wrote in blank verse and used fragmented line breaks to create emphasis and to mimic the fracturing of the modern age. Frost embraced imagery, but unlike T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, his symbolic references came from the public realm instead of his personal mindscape.