Many of Frost's poems show the ways in which that memory can haunt otherwise confident expressions of patriotism, troubling complacent formulations of American history as a straightforward progress toward freedom and equality.īenedict Anderson explicates a particular passage from Renan's essay in order to convey the odd temporality of the process of 'national forgetting.' 'The essence of a nation,' writes Renan, is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. In particular, Frost's treatment of the theme of the American Indian shows that despite the willed forgetting entailed by national narratives, the memory of the brutality that founds the nation persists in the imagination of European Americans. In his thinking about national history and empire, Frost adopts a Virgilian perspective, assuming that tears are in the nature of things and that in the long-term perspective of human history, the European conquest of the Americas merely gave rise to the world's most recent empire, which in its turn, too, would someday fall. and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable' (Rotella, 242). At the same time that his poems testify to their conflicting positions within the Joycean nightmare of history, Frost himself 'distrusted progressive models. As a poet, Frost is both settled and unsettling, a writer who composes without resorting to simplistic moral categories or the easy romanticization of Indians as noble savages. A number of Robert Frost's poems reflect the necessary forgetting that Renan describes, but many of them engage in acts of remembering that honor the past without subverting any particular ideology. In the case of the United States, the conquest of Native Americans exemplifies the violence that according to Renan must always be forgotten in the formation of a nation. Unity is always effected by means of brutality' (11). 'Forgetting,' wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, 'is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.' 'Indeed,' he continues, 'historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial.

Red frost poems