The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet [...]
Robert Frost seemed stubbornly—even querulously—conservative, but it is often the case that he dramatizes political realities most shrewdly and profoundly in poems that never mention politics in the conventional sense. Shortly before the death of Robert Frost, the editor of a selection of critical essays on the poet summarized the case for his prosecution as [...]
Robert Frost’s theory goes to the heart of his entire aesthetic philosophy and conception of art, and is ultimately a vital part of his great skill and power both as a conversationalist and poet, and in his metaphorical habits of thought as a philosophical dualist: “I was poetry that talked.” From around 1913 until Robert [...]
I. Burke’s Legal Erudition Edmund Burke (1729–1797), was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and even before he graduated from Trinity College in 1749, his father, Richard Burke, registered him as a student of law in the Middle Temple in London. At age twenty-one, in 1750, Burke went to London to study law. At [...]
Figureheads Coming and Going For any of us interested in the history of post-war American conservatism (and, I assume you must be, or you wouldn’t be reading The Imaginative Conservative), we owe an immense debt to several historical figures and personalities—most immediately to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, but also to Cicero, St. Augustine [...]
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. Probably no other American poet has suffered more misunderstanding at the hands of his readers, admirers and detractors alike, than Robert Frost. The range and variety of misreadings of both the man and his poetry are legion: he was simply a nature poet, child of [...]
What made the American Republic so uniquely superior to all other previous and existing forms of government? The Founding Fathers created “the model republic,” Orestes Brownson wrote, because “they suffered themselves in all their positive substantial work to be governed by reality, not by theories and speculations.” The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, by [...]
The philosophical roots of modern political conservatism extend back over many generations through Burke and the natural law to the Middle Ages and classical antiquity. This meant that in every historical epoch in Western civil society there have always been some conservatives. Over the next three decades Russell [Kirk] and I found that this fact [...]
Poetry was to Robert Frost a special form of human revelation. It was distinct from the divine or prophetic revelations of religion, the rational understanding of philosophy and science, and the prudential wisdom of history. It was the only way mankind had of saying one thing in terms of another, aimed at insight and wisdom. [...]
James E. Person, Jr. interviews Peter J. Stanlis Peter Stanlis’s groundbreaking work, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958), forever changed the way scholars view Burke’s work. Mr. Stanlis (1919-2011) placed Burke firmly in the tradition of Western natural law reasoning. Mr. Stanlis has also published a number of essays and articles on Frost, including Robert Frost: [...]
Education by poetry is education by metaphor.—Robert Frost Robert Frost The older I get the more I am convinced that a young teacher can learn almost everything he needs to know about teaching by reading Robert Frost. He once said that “the three strands of my life” were “writing, teaching, and farming.” He [...]