Joan Aleshire: Robert Frost (January 1994)

We tend to think of Robert Frost’s poetry as highly controlled, but in this lecture Joan Aleshire chooses to explore those poems that “seem to escape conscious direction.”  Giving particular attention to “For Once, Then, Something,” “Directive,” and “Too Anxious For Rivers,” and drawing on Frost’s unpublished notebooks, Aleshire asks us to consider the control that characterizes Frost’s work, as well as the ways in which his best poems undermine that control.