18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostA Time To Talk
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Arrow and the Song” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1845)
Written at the beginnings of the era that Frost’s generation would largely reject, this poem, by America’s national poet of the Gilded Age, presents a reassuring theme about the importance of others and how the poet ultimately finds validation for his songs in sharing them with others. Any actions we take, the poem argues, need the response and involvement of others.
“The Soul Selects Its Own Society” by Emily Dickinson (1862)
More in line with Frost’s chilling existentialist vision of a world that threatens with isolation and routine, Dickinson celebrates the strength and temerity of the soul in reaching out to someone, anyone, to lessen the burden and anxiety of facing an empty cosmos. In finding a way to another, the poem argues, the soul refuses to surrender to the evidence of its own vulnerability and alienation.
“Old Friends” by Edgar Guest (1925)
A representative voice of the genre of hospitality and friendship poems that defined both Gilded Age America and Victorian England, Guest, a staggeringly popular poet in his time all but forgotten today, here celebrates with a warmth uncomplicated by irony the simple pleasures of friends, old and new. The poem argues that a friend is a forever keepsake, a constant source of comfort. This is the kind of poem Frost, ever the existentialist, could not endorse without a snarky smile.
Further Literary Resources
“Anxiety, Fear and Form in the Poetry of Robert Frost” by Lisa Henrichsen (2008)
The article explores Frost’s signature free-floating anxiety, his Modernist expression of unnamable fears in a universe that had so quickly become vast and meaningless. That anxiety found relief in the self-protective gesture of boundaries, walls and fences that symbolically protect the terrified individual. Although it does not specifically use “A Time to Talk,” many of its examples come from the same period in Frost’s life.
“The Daily Living of Robert Frost” by Siobhan Phillips (2008)
The article explores a seldom-explored angle in Frost’s poetry, the comfort his characters often take in the simple gesture of talking. In this ritual of communication, characters keep at bay the nagging sense of alienation and the terrors of a life without purpose or meaning. The article analyzes Frost as a dramatist who uses the premise of character and dialogue in his poems to heighten the import of talk.
“Robert Frost and the Medical Application of Poetry” by Debbie McCulliss (2015)
A fascinating approach to Frost through psychoanalytical terms, the article argues that Frost accepts alienation as a given. Alone, his characters experience the life-dramas of love, family, work, and ultimately death. They cope alone unable to find a way to express their yearning, their fears, in words. Thus, in “A Time to Talk,” the poet never shares the actual conversation. The poem is decidedly mute—the two never actually talk.
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
