Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost’s Loose Iambics

This essay reevaluates scansion as an experimental mediator of poetic production and reception in the context of Robert Frost’s oeuvre and modernist poetics. Bringing contemporary linguistics to bear on historical poetics and prosody, I argue that Frost’s early poem “In Neglect” and the better known “Mowing” constitute precise pivots in and against the historical horizon of scansion, but without recourse to free verse. As highly technical sonic experiments these “loose iambic” poems defiantly retrained past readers and push contemporary critics towards new analytic tools;“loose iambics” therefore disrupt the prevailing literary-historical alignment of modernity with non-metrical verse.