Date of Award
Summer 8-2013
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Chair
Jonathan Barron
Committee Chair Department
English
Committee Member 2
Martina Sciolino
Committee Member 2 Department
English
Committee Member 3
Charles Sumner
Committee Member 3 Department
English
Abstract
The absence of criticism on Robert Frost's "The Draft Horse" suggests that it is a challenge to Frost scholarship. This reading views Frost's strange and neglected poem as a return to a monomyth offered by James Frazer's hugely influential The Golden Bough. In "The Draft Horse," Frost reconsiders the concept of ceremonial sacrifice that undergirds Frazer's encyclopedic study of world culture and, by performing ceremony as a kind of modem poesis, Frost complicates the hero/sacrificial object role and critiques the progressive ideology that grounds Frazer's account to fashion a troubling epic for modern America that implicates its national readers in a kind of savagery.
Copyright
2013, Eugene Charles McGregor Boyle III
Recommended Citation
Boyle, Eugene Charles McGregor III, "Why I Killed the Draft Horse: The Golden Bough, Robert Frost, and "Progress"" (2013). Master's Theses. 409.
https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/409