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Robert Frost Poetry Analysis

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Feelings Transcending Time Poetry is essentially the gateway to human emotion through the expression of words. From the 16th to 20th century, poets like William Shakespeare, John Keats and Robert Frost expressed emotions similar to poets of today. In these different time periods, each poet masterfully crafted timeless pieces applying a variety of syntactic devices to create expressive poems. In the 16th century, Shakespeare used quatrains and couplets to write his sonnets. Some hundred years later, John Keats was a prominent figure in Romanticism, a poetic style known for expressing emotional passion in the 19th century. More recently, in the 20th century, Robert Frost wrote metaphysical poems that held an underlying meaning within them. These three poets expressed emotions in their poems through specific forms of sentence structure and word arrangement. The syntax in the poems, “Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost, “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare, and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats reveals the author's personal experiences with loneliness, love and admiration for other people. The use of anaphora in “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost emphasizes the speaker’s experience of coping with loneliness. At the beginning of his poem, Frost repeatedly uses “I have.” He begins outlying his revelation. “I have been one acquainted with the night./I have walked out in rain—and back in rain./I have outwalked the furthest city light” (Arp 894).

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