Tradition and Transformation: Frost’s “Home Burial” and the Poetics of Mild Transformation

In negotiation with the modernist literary agenda, Frost wrote his North of Boston and strived to publish it in London at a time when American publishers mostly aligned with the then-new trend of modernism. When the book won Frost both national and international acclaim – as it was favorably reviewed by Ezra Pound, one of the pillars of modernist poetry – Henry Holt hastened to win the prerogative of becoming Frost’s first American publisher. Endeavoring to understand the book’s special character, the present article sheds light on “Home Burial,” one of the narrative pieces in North of Boston which shows Robert Frost at his best as both traditionalist and innovator. A study of the poem’s poetic structure, narrative design, and language will seek to explain how the New England poet, thanks to the special strategy he adopts – what this article calls ‘poetics of mild transformation’– managed to reconcile the old with the new without wholly surrendering to the dictations of modernist poetics