SOURCE: Kilcup, Karen L. “The Faded Flowers Gay.” In Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition, pp. 44-47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Kilcup asserts that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a “feminine” poem and compares it to Helen Hunt Jackson's “Down to Sleep.”

The final goal of the war on sentimentalism was to consolidate cultural authority over and against a dangerous feminine and feminizing mass culture. Ostensibly excluded from modernism is the sentimentality that resides within it, for (feminine) emotion remains transgressive in a culture structured by (masculine) rationality.¹ Nevertheless, as my discussion of Frost's poetry so far indicates, to characterize the sentimental as defined solely by the emotional realm oversimplifies at best. What we need to interrogate more narrowly are kinds of emotion, the means for their evocation in all poetry, and the interaction of appeals to feeling and...