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.