Robert Frost

• “Sermons in Stones” (editorial). Centrum 2 (1974): 79–86.
The difference between what H. P. Grice calls natural meaning and nonnatural meaning, especially as regards the absence or presence of communicative intention, is dramatized in an important though little-known poem by Robert Frost about writing and reading, “A Missive Missile” (1934).
• “Understanding Poetic Speech Acts.” College English 36 (1975): 632–39.
• Reprinted in Linguistic Perspectives on Literature. Ed. M. K. L. Ching, M. C. Haley, and R. F. Lunsford. London: Routledge, 1980. 95–104.
• Reprinted in Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications. Ed. Dallin D. Oaks. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997. 526–34.
Includes an analysis of the speech acts performed in Frost’s poem “Spring Pools.”
• “A Missive Missile.” The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. 209–10.
Account of a poem that “dramatiz[es] the illusions or frustrations of interpretation.”

Michael Hancher
Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://mh.cla.umn.edu/frost.html
Comments to: mh@umn.edu
Created February 1995 
Last revised 17 January 2001