Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

4-2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Literature

Reader 1

Robert Faggen

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Abstract

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is an unshakeable story that has invited engagement from artists for centuries. But Frost’s approach is unlike any other. A close study of his engagements with the story reveals, as I hope to show in this paper, that Frost saw a kind of metaphorical truth in the creation story. Though invalid as a scientific account of the origins of mankind, the story of Adam and Eve and their subsequent loss of Eden nonetheless remains a successful distillation of our social identity. To Frost, its portrayal of our emotional behavior, our desire for companionship, our ceaseless striving for knowledge and transcendence, as well as our relationship to the plants and animals of the natural world, captures a certain essence of our existence. Thus, in his poetic practice of metaphor, we observe Frost seeking to revive our understanding of these ineffable but quintessentially human characteristics by bringing the myth into his poetry.

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