著者

山田 武雄

出版者

関西学院大学

雑誌

言語と文化 = 語言与文化 (ISSN:13438530)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.83-99, 2004-03-01

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Robert Frost (1874-1963) published his 8th book of poetry, Steeple Bush (1947), when he was 73 years old. As an aged person, he was afraid that general readers as well as his literary critics might think that he was already past his poetic prime. As if he tried to show his youthfulness, he actually cultivated in Steeple Bush new fields of his poetic world, one of which was to write several political satires or epigrams against atomic bombs. These poems are often neglected, and the white-haired poet also didn't mention them or seldom read them in his public lectures. This is because he wanted to be an influential, great poet-statesman as he sometimes said clearly in public. He was afraid that these poems might bring him bad effects if they were too direct and attacked the government authorities too severely, which was the reason he chose poetic forms of epigram or satire and took an ambiguous, optimistic attitude. In a sense he was right in writing this kind of difficult poems of epigram or satire, because these poems didn't attract so much attention, and he was chosen to read his best-known, patriotic poem, "The Gift Outright," by J. F. Kennedy at his presidential inauguration. Although these poems are so ambiguous and at the same time difficult that we are apt to be irritated in trying to understand the real state of his mind, we should pay more attention to them. When we read them carefully we can understand his humanitarian character and gradually realize that he couldn't help protesting "a new Holocaust" (CPPP 399) as "a political separatist," not as a propagandist, although these poems were too idealistic and optimistic.