Robert Frost, James Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson Deal with Pain
Different Aspects of Pain Pain is a subject to which all people can relate. There are many different types of pain, and people react to these pains in various ways. Pain is also caused from many different sources. It could be from grief, stress, or a significant event that occurs in one’s life. Pain is defined in the Dictionary as “mental or emotional suffering or torment.” The poetry of Robert Frost, James Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson all display different aspects of pain. Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California where his father worked as a newspaper editor. This may have been where Robert was first exposed to the aspect of writing. Robert’s first published poem was in a school newspaper at the age of 16 where he wrote a poem on the subject of Cortez in Mexico. Although he attended Dartmouth for seven weeks and spent two years at Harvard, he never finished a college education with a degree. After he had gotten married, he worked as a schoolteacher, and during this period is when he spent time writing the majority of his poetry. After his teaching career, he moved to England to pursue getting his works published since his poetry was not accepted for publishing in America. His first two books of poems, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, were published in England and then later in America due to the overwhelming popularity of them in England (Greenberg ix-x). Frost’s poem “Out, Out” tells a story of the tragic death of a boy due to a buzz saw. The title is an allusion to act five William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where the main character, Macbeth, performs a soliloquy regarding the death of his wife: "Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." The allusion to Shakespeare in the title is appropriate to the subject matter because the soliloquy of