How Frost and Owen Use Poetry to Destroy Clichés

Introduction: Poetry as a Vehicle for Challenging Clichés

Perhaps one of the most useful aspects of modern poetry as a literary medium is its unique ability to take the words of a cliché and, through the intense language of the poetic form, force readers to reconsider that cliché in a new light. Both Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen and Mending Wall by Robert Frost take common phrases that "everyone" supposedly knows to be true. Yet both poets use language, the speaker's unique perspective, and powerful imagery to undercut these accepted moral tropes.

Frost's 'Mending Wall' and the Myth of Good Fences

In the case of the American New Englander Robert Frost, the cliché his poem "Mending Wall" attacks is "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker is a farmer engaged in what seems to be a common, annual act of mending the fences between his property and his neighbor's. The poem, like Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," is located in a very specific place and time — New England, 1915, in the case of Frost. During this commonplace act, however, Frost achieves a new perspective on the life of a terse New England farmer.

The poet wonders if there is "something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / and spills the upper boulders in the sun, and makes gaps even two can pass abreast." Frost attributes a kind of mysterious power to nature — a force that wishes to attack the artificial walls human beings erect between themselves, walls that demarcate one area of the natural world as theirs and another as not theirs.

The Stubborn Neighbor and the Limits of the Cliché

Unlike hunters and their dogs, the repairs Frost makes seem, to his imagination, inexplicable, and they are also ineffectual: "We have to use a spell to make them balance: / 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'" The neighbor the poet speaks to during this spring mending stubbornly insists "Good fences make good neighbors," even though, as Frost pointedly observes, "My apple trees will never get across / and eat the cones under his pines." Clearly, something deeper is at stake in the clinging to fences in the absence of livestock. The specificity of the acts and references described during this "mending time" makes the scenario feel real to the reader, and it lends credibility to the speaker's questioning of the idea that people must be fenced off from one another — both in terms of property and emotion — lest they come into conflict.

Ultimately, the neighbor is impenetrable, but the act of writing the poem is cathartic for the author, and it prompts the reader — if not the neighbor — to question his "father's saying," as the man stalks the wood "like a savage." Frost wishes he could argue openly with his neighbor as he argues with himself, and by extension with the reader: "I wonder / if I could put a notion in his head: / 'Why do they make good neighbors?'"

Conclusion: Observation, Argument, and the Death of the Cliché

Like Frost's poem, Owen's poem is primarily a recorded observation of another — a stranger. But Owen's poem takes the form of an observation, not a stilted conversation as in "Mending Wall." In Dulce et Decorum Est, the man dies before the poet's eyes, and rather than argue with him, the end of the poem speaks for the man, who dies choking in a haze of gas the poet himself nearly inhaled. It is not sweet to die so, says Owen. And though spring mending time may come again for Frost, the dying soldier haunts Owen in his dreams every night, suggesting that the poem is a perpetual recollection rather than a single incident. In this way, both poets use the specificity of lived experience to strip away the comfortable distance that clichés provide, and to leave the reader with something more honest in its place.