Author Description

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by, feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminizing of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatizes as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations - to be manly and to be a poet - inform his entire poetics. Rather than approaching Frost's poetry with the methods and assumptions of deconstruction in mind, Professor Kearns finds that Frost himself forces a deconstructive reading: his unstable ironies, his complexities, and his manipulations of form are designed precisely to produce the conviction that any suggestion of significance is arbitrary and personal. The study unites biography, psychology, and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.