A defensive eye: anxiety, fear and form in the poetry of Robert Frost.

This essay argues that Robert Frost's poems enact a poetic and psychic process of displacing and managing generalized anxiety through converting it into object-specific fear. Drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra and Eric Santner, this essay analyzes how and why Robert Frost's poems display a "defensive eye": a self-protective relationship to the world dependent upon a continual switching of visual and linguistic perspectives that diffuses the pressures interior to the poem and creates a "momentary stay against confusion." Through close readings of "The Vantage Point," "The Mending Wall," "The Wood-Pile," "The Fear," "An Old Man's Winter Night" and "A Considerable Speck," the essay traces Frost's visual preoccupation with boundaries, walls, doors, and frames that demarcate spatial limits, and describes how the poem negotiates the psychological and linguistic tension between containment and catharsis.

Keywords: Robert Frost / anxiety / fear / Eric Santner / Sigmund Freud

My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer. Am I any good? That's what I'd like to know and all I need to know.

--ROBERT FROST LETTER To KIMBALL FLACCUS, OCTOBER 26, 1930)

The problem of anxiety," wrote Sigmund Freud in his 1917 Introductory Lectures, "is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our own mental existence" (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 393). Psychoanalytic critics have long noted literature's power to process psychic experience: Suzanne Henke, for example, notes the way in which narrative offers a kind of talking cure--what she calls "scriptotherapy"--through the process of confronting and verbalizing experience (Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Woman's Life Writing, 1998). Yet anxiety, by definition, is nebulous: an affect more sensed than sensible, indefinite in its origins and ends, psychically and spatially dislocated, and linguistically difficult to describe. If modernism was, as W.H. Auden famously wrote, the age of anxiety, an account of how the felt structure of anxiety is registered in modern writing needs to be articulated. How do literary texts register, reshape, and release anxiety?