Robert Frost: ‘The Fear’

Abstract

The fear predicated in the title of Robert Frost’s dramatic poem ‘The Fear’ (1915) is an intermedial affect experienced in view of a radical incongruity of word and image. The mismatch becomes evident in the poem as verbal reason attempts to overcome visual imagination but fails to do so and instead accelerates the inherent unnaturalness of the unsettling scene and the affected media. In this fashion, ‘The Fear’ resists psychological readings that would treat it as a symptom of a natural ailment beyond the poetic form as well as such discursive interpretation that would neglect the precarious visual element involved by fixing a verbal meaning. In place of these options, which recall how both Hoffmann and Kleist have been approached in the past, I will argue that ‘The Fear’ exposes the complexity of human experience only against the natural circumstances in which it occurs and in doing so intimates a different understanding for how language may be conceived of. As a result, it will not be enough to claim, as some commentators have done, that ‘The Fear’ grows out of an actual source of threat, a relationship drama, or the idea of an endangered home. Instead, as I will indicate, the horror of Frost’s poem stems from the futility of such assertions by underscoring their explicative inadequacy and by using the words and images they depend on to intensify the latent sensation of brooding unease.