Southern Miss Professor, Robert Frost Expert Publishes New Book

University of Southern Mississippi English professor Dr. Jonathon Barron isn't just familiar with the life and works of famed American poet Robert Frost—he's an expert.

Director of the Robert Frost Society and editor of The Robert Frost Review, Barron recently had his new book How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter published by University of Missouri Press. In it Barron argues for a new way of reading Frost as a poet who stands at the intersection of 19th-century romanticism and 20th-century modernism.

One of the most influential poets in American history, Frost is arguably best known for his works “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Barron asserts that while Frost used the values and techniques of 19th-century poetry, it was his commitment to realism that gave him popular as well as scholarly appeal. His book investigates the innovative poetry Frost published in popular magazines from 1894 to 1915, which laid the groundwork for his enduring legacy and launched a new realist tradition in American verse.

He credits his students at USM with giving him new insight into Frost's work. “I never fully understood the realism of Frost's poetry until I began teaching him here at Southern Miss,” Barron said.

“Fundamentally, Frost is a rural poet more than a New England poet--which is something I only understood deeply after teaching him to students in a rural state in the Deep South,” he said. “My students here are some of Frost's most accurate readers.”
 
Barron is also the author of Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost. His expertise and research also include American Literature, American poetry and Jewish-American literature. For more information about Barron's work and the USM Department of English, visit http://www.usm.edu/english/faculty/jonathan-barron.