An examination of the perspectives of the work of three authors regarding the topic of Robert Frost’s suggestion poem The Oven Bird that there are no heroes.
This paper discusses Robert Frost’s poem “The Oven Bird,” which suggests that are no heroes and that “Enough” can never be done and potential can never be fully realized. It looks at the opinion of three other poets on the same topic as represented in T. S. Elliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, Wallace Steven’s “The Idea of Order in Key West” and “The Snows of Kilamanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway. It shows that the commonality of the three works is the premise that man is insufficient and the variance is the approach of the protagonists to this problematical knowledge.
“One the opposite end of the number line from Prufrock is Wallace Steven’s Key West woman. Where Prufrock slogs through life with a not me/who me? attitude, the lady of the beach says me, me! She struts along, making her own music, pridefully and tragically believing she can alone truly create. It was her voice that made the sky acutest at its vanishing. / She measured to the hour its solitude. /She was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang (Stevens 1176). She can even compete with the forces of the universe and come out measuring up; why, she even causes the sea to become part of her, not vice versa: And when she sang, the sea, /Whatever self it had, became the self/That was her song, for she was the maker (1177).”