Certainty in Uncertainty: Robert Frost and Quantum Duality

Gi Taek Ryoo. 2015. Certainty in Uncertainty: Robert Frost and Quantum Duality. Studies in British and American Language and Literature 116, 57-82. Frost’s poetry presents a reality much like the one that was being explored by quantum physics. One can find, in his poems, many references and allusions to the exciting and provocative concepts such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s principle of complementarity. Many critics indeed have explored the ways in which Frost’s poetry depicts an inevitable uncertainty and limitation of human subjectivity. Acknowledging the coexistence of irreconcilable opposites in nature necessarily evokes ‘uncertainty’ in mind. Frost’s uncertainty, however, illuminates the essentially indecisive and probabilistic nature of our life rather than human limitation or inevitable humanistic manipulation or interpretation of reality. This particular aspects of Nature’s―rather than human’s―uncertainty are deeply imbedded in Frost’s philosophy of dualism. This paper proposes to offer a more balanced account of Frost’s uncertainty, moving beyond the previous critics’ somewhat limited epistemological analysis, by applying a more comprehensive framework of quantum theories, to a larger span of Frost’s poetry and poetics. Frost’s poetry can be better understood by looking at his poetics of uncertainty not just from an epistemological perspective but from an ontological perspective as well.