Birches (Historical Context)

Historical Context

It is perhaps ironic that “Birches,” set in a peaceful, almost idyllic New England landscape, first appeared during one of the most destructive wars in history. “Birches” was first published in 1915, when World War I was raging on the European continent. “Birches” shows little sign of the larger conflict that was engulfing the world; it is in no sense a war poem, and it displays no obvious political content. However, it is notable that there are many violent acts either shown or implied in the poem and that the language of conquest is conspicuous in the middle section of the poem.

Although Frost first reached prominence around the end of World War I, he had little in common with other poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who also became famous at that point. For one thing, he was over ten years older than either poet; for another, he lacked the rebel sensibility that led the younger poets to reject traditional forms in favor of a new poetics that are today called modern. Pound and Eliot were influenced by poets such as Baudelaire, author of “Flowers of Evil,” and by his successors, French symbolist poets such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme. Their poems not only made use of a rich vocabulary of symbolic expression (often drawn from religious or mythological sources) but also turned away from traditional verse forms, which they found too rigid and artificial to express their ideas and feelings. Pound and Eliot (in his early period) worked within a style known as imagism, a successor to the symbolist movement, which strove to find concrete, arresting images that contained powerful symbolic associations and to create a vivid picture in the reader’s mind.

Frost, however, looked back to an earlier tradition. He remained within the bounds of regular verse forms, and his primary influences were poets from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, such as the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) and the American poet Edward Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935). Typically for Frost, however, he cited earlier poets as his influences: the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) and, even further back, the Roman poets Horace and Virgil.

Frost’s language, though, reflected the changes sweeping through the world of poetry. He rejected the stilted, artificial poetry of many nineteenth-century poets (including Robinson) in favor of a language, despite its use of such words as “e’en” and “twere,” that sounds like the speech of ordinary people. His descriptions of the natural world are both arresting images and complex symbols that carry the weight of his moral convictions. So, although most of his poems do not reflect the political and historical realities of the time they were written (only late in his life, when Frost had become somewhat of a political figure himself as perhaps America’s most well-known and beloved poet, does his poetry begin to reflect these things) and despite their backwards-looking forms, they remain very much, poems of their time.