Different as the two poets are in many ways, and though Frost conducted a kind of private war with Eliot, it is possible to discer...n interesting resemblances beneath the obvious contrasts. In both men the central theme is metaphysical desolation. Both poets are profoundly at odds with the current of secular optimism flowing from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century. Frost's New England landscape, spare, hard, and usually unyield ing, inhabited by its declining Yankee stock, can be taken as an extended metaphor expressive of that desolation. In Frost's poetry the central persona or dramatic voice speaking the poems finds ways to live with that desolation. In Eliot's poetry the central persona lives through and finally beyond the desolation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in Lon...don--he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell--turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »