Tag: religious symbolism

Literary Criticism

Robert Frost: Allegory, Spiritual Crisis and Punxsutawney Phil in “After Apple-Picking”

The common mistake that readers and critics have made with Frost’s work is to read metaphor and symbol out of the poetry and attempt to render it as stark realism. It is Frost’s ulteriority, often revealed through the unconventional use of familiar poetic figurations, that compels us to explore the agons inherent in his work, otherwise we’d have very few reasons to return to the poems as often as we do.