"Beyond Confusion": Robert Frost's American Dream

“The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” This characteristically enigmatic line from “Mowing” embodies one of the central paradoxes of Robert Frost’s poetry. Despite the outward appearance of stolid realism that his poems present, a great deal of dreaming does go in them. At times his poems seem to warn against the risks – even the psychological dangers – of this activity, but there are also many cases where the capacity to dream could be said to constitute an essential tool of survival. The paper concludes by examining Frost’s greatest exploration of both the capacity and the need to dream, in his late poem “Directive”, which is itself dreamlike in its imagery, movement and structure.