Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.