Date of Award:

8-2012

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

English

Committee Chair(s)

Paul Crumbley

Committee

Paul Crumbley

Committee

Michael Sowder

Committee

Brock Dethier

Abstract

The central question to this thesis is: how is knowledge about nature created? A comprehensive study to adequately answer this question would be impossible; therefore, this thesis focuses on two prominent American poets’ approaches to nature: Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. These poets’ nature poems are comparable for several reasons with a few being that both lived the majority of their lives in New England; both have had a significant impact on American nature writing; and both use nature as central to their work. But most importantly, Dickinson’s and Frost’s poetry are comparable because they have seemingly opposed approaches to nature.

After the introduction, chapter two focuses on Dickinson. One of her primary uses of nature in her poetry focuses on nineteenth-century women. Women in the nineteenth century lived under strict expectations from society, religion, and family. Nature metaphors were frequently compared to women in order to keep them within society’s assigned roles. Such a comparison often led women to internalize societal beliefs, which led to women assuming such expectations were natural. As such, my analysis of Dickinson’s use of nature focuses on her censorship of nineteenth-century society. She questions whether meaning and knowledge about nature is found or a figment of the imagination. She favors the idea that knowledge about nature (especially when applied to women) is socially constructed.

Frost, on the other hand, prefers to investigate nature with the hope of finding value in nature that inherently exists. The third chapter points to Frost’s focus on the important role the individual plays in both discovering and making meaning about nature rather than all meaning being socially constructed. A constant thread through much of his poetry is the fear that nature holds no inherent meaning, disproving the existence of a higher being. His poetry, however, reasons out a way to counteract the social constructivism of Darwinian theory that so pervasively influenced his time. Many of Frost’s themes and use of nature stress the importance of the human imagination, making his approach to nature seemingly opposed to Dickinson’s.

The word “seemingly” introduces the central point of the fourth and last chapter. Though Dickinson prefers social constructivism and Frost favors the imagination, both poets’ use of nature equally favor how knowledge is created rather than what knowledge is created. The last chapter points out that a critical approach is needed when making meaning about the natural world. Assuming that all meaning is socially constructed devalues knowledge about the natural world; assuming that all meaning must be initiated and maintained by the imagination, however, risks the credibility of knowledge created. Thus, not only does a comparison of these two poets’ nature poetry enhance our appreciation for such unique approaches, it also gives us a way to look at how meaning and knowledge is created about the natural world in our modern society. A simple application of this approach could benefit society in recognizing that there resides a romantic hope as a subtext in consumer marketing that nature contains some sort of inherent, self-evident meaning (the belief in a plutonic reality).

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This work made publicly available electronically on July 30, 2012.

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