Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Robert Frost's ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and
political discourse
Kenneth D. Madsen*, D.B. Ruderman
The Ohio State University, 1179 University Drive, Newark, OH 43055, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 30 January 2015
Received in revised form
3 June 2016
Accepted 15 June 2016
Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of
borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers,
others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In
light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to
define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We
use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily
lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred
within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and
Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic
movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until
and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very
concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and
political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own
humanity intersects with that of others.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Boundaries
Bordering
Robert Frost
Poetry
Psychoanalysis
Ambivalence
1. Mending Wall
1 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.
5 The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
10 No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
15 We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
20 We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K.D. Madsen), [email protected]
(D.B. Ruderman).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.06.003
0962-6298/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
There where it is we do not need the wall:
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
25
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
30
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
35 Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
40
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
45
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
(Frost, 1915 p. 11e13; see also; Frost, 1914, 1949, 1956)
In Robert Frost's poem “Mending Wall” two rural neighbors
make repairs on a common wall dividing their properties (Fig. 1).
The narrator appears at first glance to be decisive about the subject
of walls and fences. Use of the poem in academic border studies is
largely premised on this assumption and treats its first line
Fig. 1. The wall at the Frost homestead, Derry, New Hampshire, 2015. Photo by Julie
Ames.
83
“something there is that doesn't love a wall” as though it were an
essential truth. The neighbor meanwhile is portrayed as resolute
and a man of few wordsdonly uttering a single phrase twice: “good
fences make good neighbors.” Advocates of contemporary border
barriers (Fig. 2) adopt the second refrain with its no-nonsense logic
as a kind of rallying cry, a deeply pragmatic position often accompanied by incredulity that anyone could fail to recognize the simple
truths it contains. Whether because of the concision and apparent
wisdom of the statements, or because political identification seems
to require believing one set of propositions at the expense of
another, the two parts of the poem tend to be taken in isolation.
We argue that what is useful and generative in “Mending Wall”
is precisely its ambivalence about borders and boundaries and
believe that an integrated, contextual, and holistic reading of the
poem can offer political geographers a way to think about the nature of the relationship between the two perspectives presented.
Such a reading of “Mending Wall” allows us to reflect on how the
constant negotiation of internal and external boundaries might be
motivated by something beyond mere political positionea productive and necessary ambivalence. The history we sketch of the
poem's two sayings reminds us how easily aphoristic thinking can
rob us of the richness of our political and personal experience. We
argue that Frost's insistence on narrative complexity and struggle,
what we term his “ambivalence,” is not reducible to a compromise
or middle path, but instead offers a radical awareness of and
responsiveness to the ways our political ideas and commitments
are being constantly formed and reformed.
Parker et al. (2009) write that a binary opposition has come to
dominate Western understandings of borders, obscuring dynamics
of “undecidability, indistinction and indeterminacy” (p. 584). This
call to look beyond the dualisms that borders represent is a starting
point for border studies and the discipline of political geography
more broadly. Perhaps not surprisingly, discussions of ambivalence
do appear to be emerging in studies that consider borders in
tente, as opposed to active fortification (Till et al., 2013). Yet there
de
is value to ambivalence in both of these contexts and perhaps
especially so in the latter case where it is not easily practiced. Just as
geographers have broadened their scope in terms of where borders
and bordering processes are found (i.e. Johnson et al., 2011; Lamb,
2014; Mountz, 2013), the discipline should also open itself up to
internal conceptualizations of ambivalence.
Fig. 2. U.S.-Mexico border barrier near Naco, Arizona/Sonora, 2009. Photo by Kenneth
D. Madsen.
84
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
Political borders and boundaries play a fundamental role in our
lives and society even if, as individuals with distinct positionalities,
we have dramatically different feelings concerning the appropriate
extent of their barrier function. In our reading of Frost's poem
“Mending Wall” we want to shift the focus away from an opposition
between conservative (keep them out) and progressive (let them
in) positions towards a deeper, dialectical, and more ideological
crux, namely that ambivalence itself might be a powerful position,
politically and inter-subjectively. The ethos of the poem, inseparable from its structure and shifting rhythms, helps us to see the
-vis border barriers as well as to
complexity of both positions vis-a
recognize the mutually-constituted relationship between these
divergent perspectives. Acknowledging and addressing ambivalence as dramatized in Frost's poem allows geographers and border
scholars to better understand our inner positionality in a theoretical as well as empirical sense and to better grasp the many facets of
the places and people we study.
We also present this particular reading hoping to shift the use of
“Mending Wall” within border studies from a poem with a clear and
concise message to that of an unfinished and conflicting whole. In
generic terms, we read the poem as a lyric rather than an allegory.
And whereas ambivalence within Frost's poetics has been recognized by some scholars of literature, its value as a political strategy
has gone largely un-theorized. To attempt this theorization, we
embrace multiple interpretative perspectives: the text and the
circumstances of its composition, Frost's role as author, and the
poem's popular and academic reception. Our critical method is
informed by Jameson's (1981) three interpretive horizons. As such
we read the text as a social object (what are its contexts and where
are we situated within them?), as a symbolic act (what has it come
to mean?), and its “ideology of form” (what does its production tell
us about who we were, are, and might become) (p. 76).
In what follows we situate Frost's poem in historical context and
relate it to the discipline of geography. We then highlight specific
ways that scholars interested in borders have made reference to
lines from Frost's poem. A closer analysis of the poem in its entirety
then suggests new understandings of its structure and reception,
specifically its tenacious refusal to take a side even though the
poem itself is about the importance and inevitability of taking
sides. In the last two sections we consider what we can learn from
this ambivalence in a political sense. In so doing we draw on psychoanalytic theory in order to consider the role borders play in our
lives and the inherent tensions between bordering and debordering processes, or put another way between closure and
openness or isolation and interconnectedness (Bergson, 1988, p.
111). Consideration of these phenomena provides insight to our
-vis borders and a renewed perspective on
lived experience vis-a
our understandings of the political role of borders between
contemporary nation-states as well as in our daily lives. In the final
section we delve deeper into Frost's own thoughts on “Mending
Wall” and bordering processes to better understand this particular
poem and outline an ethics of ambivalence. Throughout the paper
we treat the poetic and the political as inseparable elements of the
geographicereciprocally informing each other and open to the
ongoing work of ambivalence.
2. The poem, political geography, and literature
First published in England in 1914 (and the United States a year
later) as part of Frost's second book of poetry, “Mending Wall” was
written in the waning years of European imperialism and the onset
of World War I. Read in light of the time's geopolitics, geographers
might recognize a desire for clear distinction of emergent national
identities and colonial control. Understood ambivalently, one could
also read in the final lines of the poem a passing judgment of the
political “darkness” in which the era moved. This early setting for
Frost's poem pushes us to understand that the issue of negotiating
boundaries and borders comes much earlier and in other types of
struggles than the contexts in which “Mending Wall” is currently
widely cited.
The popularity of “Mending Wall” took off with the wide circulation of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost in 1949 (Mieder,
2003) and reflects Frost's rising public profile (Gerber, 1982, p.
25). Not surprisingly, the poem struck a nerve during the Cold War.
With its “intense concern about drawing limits,” writes Axelrod
(2003), the poem “became one of Frost's most canonical texts …
It spoke to a people consumed with the burdensome task of
creating a ‘containing wall’ around communism” (p. 865; see also
Lippmann, 1947, p. 56). Constructing a more tangible barrier to back
up its own restrictions on movements across its border with the
West, the German Democratic Republic began construction on a
barbed wire fence in 1951 and closed the inner German border a
year later. An even more complete sealing, including construction
of the Berlin Wall, began in 1961 (Buchholz, 1994, pp. 56e57) and
gave Frost's poem a renewed immediacy.
Post-Cold War borders and more recent debates concerning
border barriers provide only the latest geographic context for
interpreting this poem. In many ways “Mending Wall” is a
Rorschach test in which proponents see and hear their own positions reflected in the narrative contours of the poem. And while
political geography has embraced the idea that impartiality is as
much a distracting pretense as a useful position from which to
produce scholarship, we believe that such a shift threatens to mask
the fact that all political positions emerge from a complex set of
determinationsdlike walls they are constructions that over time
appear to us as natural, self-evident, and self-explanatory truths.
To theorize “Mending Wall's” reception and understand its use
of spatial metaphors, we read the poem as a part of a collectively
imagined social space (after Lefebvre, 1991) whose boundaries are
continuously shifting but whose contours can be productively if
only partially delimited. “Mending Wall” and Frost's oeuvre more
generally provide an unusually rich opportunity to explore our
-vis the external and internal Other (Bhabha,
ambivalence vis-a
2004, p. 214). Equally important, like much of Frost's work this
poem evokes a powerful sense of place. As part of the tradition of
the loco-descriptive poem, it offers literary scholars and geographers a way to think about “position” in all the senses of that word
(see Potkay, 2011). The loco-descriptive poem, or romantic and
post-romantic ode, links external nature (phenomenological
awareness of the environment, scenes of nature, etc.) to the general
structure of subjectivity. Thus, Charles Olson, a late romantic, is able
to begin such a poem, “I come back to the geography of it” (the “it”
being the memory of a specific place) and end the same poem with
the lines, “polis is this” (the “this” being his embodied subjectivity;
Mahoney, 2012; Morton, 2002; Olson, 1983, pp. 184e185). The
poem then becomes a means of proprioception (Olson, 1997, pp.
181e183). Whether addressed from a postcolonial (Bhabha, 2004),
Queer Theory (Butler, 1997, p. 29), Marxian (Althusser, 1990), psychoanalytic, or political geographical perspective, proprioceptionethe ability to occupy and locate oneself provisionally in
spacedis an essential aspect of becoming a political subject.
Geography's mutually-informing relationship with poetry (i.e.
Cresswell, 2014; Magrane, 2015; Olstad, 2015) has long been
recognized in the literature (Meinig, 1983). Eshun and Madge
(2012) suggest that poetry's formal richness allow it to “mediate
the intricacies and complexities of the postcolonial experience” (p.
1401). Focusing on post-war poetry in Britain and Ireland,
Alexander and Cooper (2013) further argue that poetry serves to
rejuvenate our understanding of space and place. In a very different
way, Marston and De Leeuw (2013) build upon this
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
interdisciplinarity in a special issue of the Geographical Review,
exploring how perspectives in political geography are expressed
through art. They advocate “a critical appreciation” for the capacity
of art to “pose different kinds of questions that can challenge both
the disciplinary status quo and the broader world” (p. xi). Williams
(2014) further describes how art can disrupt our geopolitical
framework, opening up new ways of understanding and knowing
the political world. And yet, it is our contention that this interdisciplinary approach is sometimes used at the expense of the richness
and complexity of one or the other of the disciplines. For example,
when geographers and others have used excerpts from “Mending
Wall” to confront attitudes toward border barriers, it seems to us
that they often do so at the expense of Frost's poetic ambivalence.
While we believe questions of ambivalence have not been
adequately addressed, broader issues of context and positionality
certainly have. Both political geographers and literary theorists
have been concerned in the last two decades, for example, with
questions of scale. For geographers, this has resulted in new concepts such as flat ontology (Marston, Jones, & Woodward, 2005)
and broader discussions over rescaling. In addition to regional,
national, and global levels of interest, this can even mean
rethinking the relation between borders and boundaries at a subjective or bodily level (Sundberg, 2008). For literary scholars, debates about scale pit various formalisms against various
historicisms (Best & Marcus, 2009; Levinson, 2007). Both discourses aim to reconfigure how we think and represent interrelatedness and causation.
Our point here is that critics from both disciplinary backgrounds must confront a difficult relationship, whether between
representation and event or discourse and figuration. It is in this
light that geographers and others have often called upon
“Mending Wall”dnearly always one of its two putatively heuristic
aphorismsdto re-affirm arguments, question principles, and offer
up analogies. Yet, as folklore scholar Mieder (2003) points out,
although proverbs are by nature ambiguous, they are ironically
more frequently “used to free complex situations from ambiguity”
(p. 155). In the case of well-known poems such as “Mending Wall”
it is not just that aphorisms are taken out of context, but rather
that context (literary and historical) itself is taken to be fixed and
stable.
It is precisely the unstable ground of this century-old poem that
we believe makes it so useful, especially insofar as it provides a
space for political geographers to re-think our social, political, and
trans-subjective relationships with border barriers. Our reading is
intended as a direct, and hopefully truly interdisciplinary,
encounter with the poem's own contradictions. The poem then is
an imaginative space to inhabit, an always available opportunity
not only to interrogate and renegotiate our internal and external
borders, our situations as well as our situatedness, but also to
consider our internal attitudes towards those interrogations, positions, and embodiments. While we try to stay true to the poem's
own ambivalence, it should be reiterated that we are not suggesting
a compromise middle position, a form of relativism, or a cynical
withdrawal wherein all positions are equal.
3. To mend or not to mend: “Mending Wall” in border studies
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” the first line of
“Mending Wall” (see also line 35)dand by many accounts the
essence or message of the poemdhas been used innumerable
times as an epigraph or byline to question the construction of
contemporary border barriers. It was, for example, the title of an
Op-Ed in The New York Times in which geographer and border
scholar Jones (2012) points out how ironic it is for prominent world
democracies to erect border walls, which are emblems of exclusion
85
rather than the ideals of freedom and democracy. Jones even goes
so far as to identify the “something” that doesn't love a wall as a
“someone,” namely those who are likely to be offended by such
structures (line 34; note pun by Frost: offence/a fence).
Casey (2011) quotes this same line in order to suggest that not
only are security walls not permanent, they may in fact be destabilized from within. Thus, such constructions are “built with
breaching as part of their scope”; it might even be said that there is
something about a wall “that does not love itself” (emphasis in
original; pp. 392e393). Such an interpretation allows Casey to
elaborate what he sees as a tension between borders (social and
political constructs that strive for absolute control) and boundaries
(porous features that reflect a more organic state). This distinction
helps us to recognize that walls and fences are conceptually, as well
as materially, constantly in flux. From a literary perspective, Vander
Ploeg (2013) references the line about not loving a wall in order to
question whether it is possible to live without “the curse of [national] identity” (p. 7). Like Casey, although from a more humanist
standpoint, Vander Ploeg reads the “something there is” as an
essential and positive force that allows us to identify with and even
love those on the other side (p. 8).
The other oft-cited aphorism from the poem, “Good fences make
good neighbors” is repeated blankly by the putative antagonist in
“Mending Wall.” Widely understood to be sage advice by readers
who support the construction of border barriers, the line rings
intuitive and true for many of us. Even those who critique its
relevance to international relations may find it useful in other
settings, a perspective that resonates in many of Frost's later
comments. Given its position in the final line (see also line 27) it
makes sense that the phrase is widely cited by many as the takeaway message of the poem. When used by border scholars, however, its message is more likely to be interrogated.
The tenor of this phrase pre-dates Frost's usage, and can be
found in a variety of cultural contexts (Mieder, 2003). Whereas
those citing the “something there is” line almost always reference
Frost (including all of the authors discussed above), the “good
fences” phrase is used both with and without an explicit connection
to “Mending Wall.” Frost's specific wording, however, has become
the de facto way to convey the idea that the best way to maintain
positive relationships with others is to clearly demarcate belonging
and ownership. In his research on contemporary border walls, Di
Cintio (2012) wrote that toward the end of his travels he even
“avoided speaking about my project because, each time I did,
someone quoted Robert Frost's ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ which made me want to scream” (p. 258).
The “good fences” phrase is easily applied, anddas is the case
with most aphorismsdable to take the place of thinking and
debate. For scholars as well as for the general public, the phrase
projects a certain self-standing logic that needs little explanation.
Newman and Paasi (1998) allude to this line in the title of an article
which otherwise makes no mention of the phrase or Frost. In
Sterling's (2009) discussion of the role of strategic barriers in defense the phrase is similarly featured in the title with only an implicit connection to his central argument. Williams (2003) makes a
direct reference to the line as used by Frost; he reads “Mending
Wall” as an explicit affirmation of the social role of borders, not as
material facts but as social phenomena that allow neighbors to
clarify each other's limits even in the absence of an immediate need
for such an action. In seeking to understand the conditions under
which good fences (a term Williams uses loosely to refer to modern
conceptions about the barrier function of territorial borders) make
good neighbors, his article raises the possibility that “borders are in
some way representative of a need for division in human ethical
life” (p. 38). Less supportive of the concept behind this aphorism,
Vallet and David (2014) also directly reference Frost in their
86
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
discussion of international relationships and border walls.
Politics and popular media also make use of the “good fences”
phrase, where it can provide a familiar cultural referent from which
to begin discussions about borders even without a direct attribution to Frost ordby silent associationdbuild on the authority
conveyed by quoting a famous poem implicitly associated with Cold
War politics. Whereas “something there is that doesn't love a wall”
is abstract and even syntactically challenging, the neighbor's refrain
is clear and unambiguous and therefore well suited for popular
political contexts.
In most references where attribution is made to Frost, only one
perspective is given without acknowledgement of the other point
of view. More problematically, this is done without placing either
aphorism within the larger narrative context of the poem. When
the contrastive passage is referenced, it is as a foil to reinforce an
author's argument. We are not arguing against bias. We understand
that most readers and literary analysts of “Mending Wall” ultimately choose a side and that, at some level, all thinking and
writing is a matter of choosing a side. But as we will demonstrate,
the poem itself dramatizes the importance of recognizing and
learning to tolerate ambivalence, a process that requires the
acknowledgement of internal as well as external difference.
Some scholars, of course, do acknowledge both passages. While
focusing primarily on the “something there is” line, Jones (2012)
quotes the “Good fences make good neighbors” passage as well.
He does so, however, only insofar as it allows him to confront those
who would use “good fences” as rationale for border barriers,
stating that ultimately the poem “challenges that truism.” Vander
Ploeg (2013), while taking the bordering impulse seriously, similarly dismisses the “good neighbors make good fences” perspective.
Davis and Williams (2008) also focus largely on the “something”
refrain and infer that our need for good neighborliness is a reflexively trumpeted and received wisdom. In contrast, although he
does not examine the contrasting phrase “something there is that
doesn't love a wall,” Williams (2003) has a more complex view of
“good fences make good neighbors,” suggesting that borders, as
contingent and situated phenomena, are valid under conditions of
cooperation, but should be contested in cases when they are used
to shut down communication or spawn conflict. We seek to extend
this insight by returning Frost's aphorism to its narrative context
and reading the entire poem in a similar ambivalent light.
Finally, while they have a very different take-away message than
most academicsdattributing the idea of justifying wall construction to Frost without any mention of the perspective represented by
the “something there is” phrasedJellissen and Gottheil (2013)
approach a partial and conditional reading of Frost's poem in
their discussion of the conditions under which walls might be
ethically justified. Yet by limiting themselves to a state-level analysis of security costs and benefits, as well as their view of such
decisions as “uncomplicated,” they certainly miss many of the
narrative and ideological nuances the poem offers and addresses.
As we have seen, in literature as well as geography, studies have
tended to emphasize one or the other of the poem's propositions
while forsaking its refusal of narrative closure. There are, however,
some literature scholars who acknowledge and celebrate the ambiguity and ambivalence at work in the Frost's poem (e.g. Beach, 1953;
Bidney, 2002; Faggen, 2006; Mieder, 2003; Timmerman, 2002;
Untermeyer, 1962). Morrissey (1988) even suggests that Frost constructs “a rhetorical ‘wall’ under the cover of pleading against walls”
(p. 63). Others praise the poem's “open-endedness” (Burnshaw,
1986, p. 279), its “curious American ambivalence about neighboring” (Merry, 1993, p. 71), and the ways in which Frost's work more
generally promises “clarity, order, and beauty only to show
increasing complexity, irony, and dysteleology” (Faggen, 1997, p. 8).
By tracing the reception and usage of the hallmark lines from
“Mending Wall,” we do not mean to invalidate previous interpretations but suggest that there is an important resistance to
meaning at the core of Frost's poem that should be brought forward
to the field of political geography. Rather than placing ideologies
across from each other on equal footing or dictating a singular
interpretation of this poem and its position in the contemporary
political landscape, we want to build on nascent usages that
recognize multiple conflicting and conflictual voices. In order to
achieve a fuller understanding of the inherent internal conflict in
“Mending Wall” and what that can mean for geography and border
scholarship we must acknowledge that opening discursive spaces
of contention is not enough; that is, we must recognize and study
the dynamics of personal as well as political conflict. When read in
this way, the poem becomes a narrative about the impossibility of
clarity.
4. “Maybe I was both fellows in the poem”: reading the poem,
theorizing ambivalence
Ambivalence, as implicitly theorized in Frost, arises from
competing drives or pressures. Thus, it should not surprise us that
“Mending Wall” took on an additional valence for critics during the
Cold War. Given the symbolism of border-boundaries at the time,
readings of the poem in this era treated walls as “touchstones of
sanity” (Montgomery, 1958, p. 350; see also; Gibb, 1962). While the
poem is often interpreted in the context of communist oppression,
the West also craved the distinction and stability such structures
provided even as it was able to blame communists for their construction. Seen from either perspective, walls were (and, we argue,
always are) also psychological.
Especially when dramatized through Mending Wall's refusal of
closure, ambivalence allows for readings in which the status
quodeven if justifiabledcannot be naturalized. According to Beach
(1953), Frost's oppositions are essential and irresolvable (p. 215).
The poem's “‘open-endedness’ of tone requires us to judge for
ourselves where the point of intersection between the positions of
the two speakers lies” (Hoffman, 2001, p. 109). Ultimately the
poem's ambiguity is most strongly manifest not only in these openended gestures but also in its moments of non-intersection. One
could read the poem as a manifesto, a playful interaction, or a
subversive way of getting two otherwise distant neighbors
togetherdbut cumulatively these add up to a productive indeterminacy. It is not only that the reader learns from both sides of the
issue and/or is forced to careen back and forth between positions, it
is also that indeterminacy is only productive insofar as it results
from positions that are necessarily antagonistic (Hegel, 1977, p. 26).
If, as Montgomery (1958) has written in a philosophical mode,
the human tendency is to use form to make meaning from the
semichaos of the world, and to subsequently impose similar forms
on the “mind of his fellow-men” (p. 350), then (internal and
external) borders play an instinctive and constitutive role in our
lives. Awareness of the constructed and ideological nature of our
forms and feelings reminds us to be always vigilant about our attitudes and judgments. In “Mending Wall” Frost invites us to
examine the extent to which we wall in or wall out, and why and
under what circumstances we should work to redraw boundaries
or tear them down. In doing so he seems to suggest that we are
obliged to take seriously the perspective of others and that we
ignore our own ambivalence about borders at our peril.
The model of ambivalence we are working with here involves a
divided subjectivity, and is derived from psychoanalytic theory, but
it needn't be restricted to it. Dürrschmidt (2006), for example,
points to a structural ambivalence obtaining to walls and borderlands more generally, which allow for hybridity and rich cultural
interplay as well cultural negation and exclusion. Richardson
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
(1997), writing about Frost's poetics, sees in his poetry a tension
between “social approval” and “self approval,” and writes that,
“Frost's circumscriptions of the poet's integrity are always also affirmations of itda final ambivalence that his poetics refuses to
resolve” (emphasis in original; pp. 175e176).
This undecidability in “Mending Wall” is formal and essential. A
modern pastoral in blank verse, it is also an elegy, in this case for an
unstated or un-nameable loss: “something there is that doesn't love
a wall.” Besides the tortured syntax of the line, the speaker acknowledges not only his ambivalence about the activity of mending
a wall, but also his befuddlement, his inability to say with any
certainty what it is in the world or in us that does not love a wall.
Ambivalence is also suggested in line 12 where Frost lets the reader
know that it is he, not the neighbor, who initiates the repairs (see
also line 6). Tellingly Frost once stated that “I make it a rule not to
take any ‘character's’ side in anything I write” (Hoffman, 2001, p.
108). In a 1927 letter Frost wrote that he intentionally designed the
poem to “trip the reader head foremost into the boundless” as a
way of referencing his “innate mischievousness” (Thompson, 1965,
p. 344). While the reader might be thrown into boundlessness,
however, the neighbor remains resolute in his position (Monteiro,
1973, pp. 466e467). Even in the face of cooperation, conversation, and gentle prodding, the neighbordlike most of usdis
resistant to change.
To read the poem ambivalently means to accept that there is no
way to know absolutely what causes gaps, in walls or in human
beings. Causation is always, in a certain sense, overdetermined
(Althusser, 1990; Lacan, 2006; Tomsi
c, 2015, pp. 79e99). Frost
muses over natural determinations such as the weather (more
specifically the “frozen-ground-swell” or, playing on the pun,
“frost”). He moves on to speculate on the role of human activities
(hunters) and later, playfully, on the super-natural (elves). Interestingly, he comments on the futility of making repairs in the face
of these forces. Twenty lines of thick description into the poem, the
speaker suddenly and surprisingly exclaims, “Oh, just another kind
of outdoor game,/One on a side. It comes to little more” (lines
21e22). Here, whereas causation is undecidable, the political
context seems inescapably clear: Frost, who was living in England
at the time of this poem's publication, and, like a good romantic
poet, was writing in estrangement from the very landscape and
ideology he was describing (Cramer, 1996, p. 30; Thompson, 1966,
pp. 432e433), would have had the imminent war on his mind, as it
no doubt was on the minds of his readers when the poem was first
published. Writing in his journal a decade later, Frost explicitly
associated the poem with “nationalist” feelings (Faggen, 2006, p.
235).
Although most readers and many critics have assumed the narrator
in “Mending Wall” as a reflection of Frost's personadCramer (1996)
even goes so far as to identify and name the character of the
neighbor (p. 30)dothers have argued against such an interpretation
(Faggen, 1997, p. 132). As a poet, Mieder (2003) argues, Frost “intended
nothing more or less than to display the confrontation of two neighbours over the maintenance of a wall” (p. 162). In 1944 Frost himself
stated that there was “no rigid separation between right and wrong” in
the poem but rather it was simply a contrast between two types of
people; a year later he was even more definitive on this point: “I played
it exactly fair … Twice I say ‘Good Fences; and twice “Something there
is e” (Cramer, 1996, p. 30). In fact, Frost often uses the first person as a
mask, which allows him to speak in someone else's voice (Cook,1974, p.
82). Thus, although the poem has some relation to Frost's personal life
and the political stakes of the poem are obvious, overdetermination
obtains even at the level of personae. Poirier (1990) reads this instability as part of Frost's poetics, his “capacity to sustain debates between
people” (p. 106). And while modernists from Eliot to Berryman made a
living blending lyric and dramatic monologue, Frost stages ethical and
87
political debates in such a way as to force the reader to explore multiple
sides of an issue from inside an unfolding narrative.
In this way Frost is indeed a late romantic. Wordsworth,
particularly in Lyrical Ballads, was able to show scenes of rural life,
which on the surface seemed to tell simple stories, but which
transcended the provincial concerns they depicted, speaking to
larger cultural, national, and even international concerns. So while
it is easy to read the neighbor as the butt of a progressive joke, we
argue that the scene in lines 38e42 is in an echoic relationship to an
older strain of romantic poetics and creates a pastoral tableau. In
poems such as “Old Man Travelling,” “Resolution and Independence,” and “Michael” Wordsworth creates peasant characters with
lives so rich in habit and tradition as to become a part of the land
they occupy and work. Although Frost's poem performs similar
kinds of concretizations, it also ironizes its perspective on the
neighbor. That is, it gives with one handdcasting the neighbor as a
Wordsworthian “man in nature”dand takes away with the otherdinflecting the tradition of mending the wall as a throwback to
“darkness” (line 41). While we don't have the space to fully develop
it here, a topological reading of “Mending Wall,” that is, a reading
that acknowledges the poem as a negotiation not only of external
but also of internal space, would have to account for these and
other resonances, mapping out the deeper formal, subjective, and
historical ambivalences at work.
Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, is a perfect meter for
the poem insofar as it creates caesurae or cuts and gaps in the line
as well as enjambments or phrases whose semantic content overflows the ends of the metrical lines. Thus the form of the poem is a
spatial analogy for a wall that needs mending. As if to dramatize the
ways in which we internalize ideology even as it surrounds us, Frost
seems particularly unsure where the something is that doesn't love
a walldis it inside or external to us? He plays with this ambiguity in
his use of the word “there.” In lines 1 and 35, “something there is
that doesn't love a wall,” it forms a semantic unit with the verb “is”
to express the existence of the “something.” But in line 23 “there
where it is we do not need a wall,” it is used in a different sense, as a
place deixis, a trope that works to break through the surface of the
poem and say to the reader, “look, right there, that's where it is.”
The poem conflates these two meanings in such a way as to reinforce the relation between “existence” and “situatedness.” As the
phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (2002) writes, “being is synonymous with being situated” (p. 294). This insistence on situatedness
helps to clarify an important aspect of Frost's ambivalence as we are
theorizing it. Ambivalence, that is, hating and loving the object
simultaneously (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 28), is not about
being undecided or de-situated. On the contrary, it is a position, an
orientation towards experience and “reality.” As such it involves
and accompanies an ongoing process of splitting and reintegrating,
bordering and de-bordering (Klein, 1987, pp. 227e229).
Frost himself was deeply ambivalent about the two positions as
well as about the possibilities for a borderless society. When asked
directly whether he would like to do away with walls altogether, he
said, “No, we will always have wallsdhave always had them. While
some are being torn down, others are being built up. Whether you
want ‘em or not you'll always have ‘em” (Cramer, 1996, p. 30).
Similarly, when asked about whether he identified more with the
speaker or the neighbor in the poem, he demurred and finally said,
“…I don't know. Maybe I was both fellows in the poem” (Cramer,
1996, pp. 30e31). Notice that Frost does not say that he could
“relate” to the other position or that he had “compassion” with the
other person. Frost is both fellows in the poem. What this suggests
is that perhaps an ethical attitude toward the other is neither a
matter of identification nor empathy. It is rather about recognizing
and coming to accept our own internal difference. On the one hand,
identification is ethically problematic insofar as it requires
88
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
resemblance (Deleuze, 1993, pp. 137e138). On the other hand and
more importantly the process of identification locates the problem
elsewhere, outside the self. When considering difference, it is
commonplace to seek a metonymic connection. In contrast, Frost
argues instead for our “non-relation” to the other (Zupan
ci
c, 2016).
Granted, the model of ambivalence we're striving to articulate is
difficult to put into practice, personally or politically. It asks that
instead of noticing sameness we notice difference. At the moment
where the Other is most other we interrogate what we have cast
out of ourselves, our abject and rejected aspects (Green, 2001, pp.
140e141). We can now reverse the proposition: I see in the other
some aspect that I am unwilling to accept in myself (Klein, 1987, pp.
197e198).
Articulating the problem in this way we can see how identification and empathy might keep us from moving towards a true
understanding of difference. Freud (1922) argues that identification
often solidifies into an ego ideal, which can result in unthinking
hatred and violence (p. 17). From a psychoanalytic point of view
then, ambivalence is not merely learning to love the other, but
rather the constant co-presence and intertwining of hatred and
love (Green, 1997, pp. 155e156). Awareness of our ambivalence
interrupts the processes of identification so that we can return to
our own unresolved inner conflicts (the “depressive position”), not
with the hope of resolving them absolutely but with the understanding that our externalized bordering of difference is often
waged in a desperate and defensive attempt not to acknowledge
our own intolerable feelings and thoughts (Klein, 1987, pp.
177e178).
Psychoanalytic theory offers border studies and political geography more generally a way to theorize the splits and projections
that tend to accompany discussions about borders and bordering.
Frost's poem provides us with a poetic narrative that dares us not to
identify with either ego ideal (poet or farmer). Rather the poem
stops us at the border so to speak. It stymies and returns us to our
own disavowed ambivalence. In psychoanalysis, this ambivalence
sets in motion a series of displacements, spatializations, and borderings, perhaps most poetically described in the Fort-Da game of
Freud. Ambivalence (like dreams, poems, or slips of the tongue) is a
compromise formation arising when two competing forces (desires, drives) come in conflict. It involves a continuing process of
splitting and redrawing the boundaries. From this, a kind of suturing occurs, where the (internal/external) object becomes clearer
and clearer for the subject (Freud, 1949; Klein, 1987; Laplanche,
1999). Yet one never really attains full knowledge of the object.
There is always anotherdhopefully narrowerdsplit, and another.
Perhaps this is why Frost is uncertain who or what he's being asked
to wall out or in (lines 32, 33). From a topological perspective, that
is, from the point of view of a spatial structure of feeling, insides
and outsides, as in a Mobius strip, merge or overlap.
It matters in this regard that Frost depicts the neighbor, the
wall, and the speaker's own attitude towards the wall as existing,
situated, and constructed rather than essential or eternal. We
believe this helps to explain why the speaker of the poem, would
rather the neighbor “said it for himself” (line 38). The problem with
each of the aphorismsd“good fences make good neighbors” and
“something there is that doesn't love a wall”dis that each is a
received notion. The “uncritical absorption” of the idea is more
problematic than the idea itself (Hoffman, 2001, p. 109). Categories,
boundaries, and identities that come from the outside and
concretize our subject positions (after Jones, 2009), while unavoidable, should at least be interrogated and reflected upon
before we accept them. Frost emblematizes this problem in
strangely Marxist language in line 24: “he is all pine and I am apple
orchard.” As in volume one of Capital a metonymic hardening has
taken place and each protagonist in the poem experiences himself
as a commodity. It is also worth noting that the phrase most often
associated with Frost's personal mindset (“something there is that
doesn't love a wall”) is not only vague, but stated in negative terms
whereas the perspective of the neighbor (“good fences make good
neighbors”) is stated positively (Mieder, 2003, p. 162). Yet this is
perhaps not so strange when we consider that affirmation is often
on the side of the status quo and negation on the side of political
change.
Frost creates for us a scenario in which bordering and mending
are at once incompatible and intertwined. While on the surface the
narrator and his neighbor are mending in the sense of repairing a
physical structure, in a political sense they are looking after common, though not necessarily shared, interests. Even more profoundly they are mending in the sense of maintainingdin a
reflective way and at a respectful distancedtheir relationship. The
narrator questions their activities and his own motives, but nonetheless participates while keeping his testier comments to himself.
The neighbor, meanwhile, refuses to get caught up in a fruitless
defense of his project. “Mending Wall” offers us a model of political
action that allows participants to join together in shared activity
despite holding vastly differing notions about what that activity
means. Hardly a utopian thinker, Frost models for us what collaboration might look like in an imperfect and constantly changing
world. In the poem, both characters wrestle with an ideological
difference that threatens but does not cripple praxis. Ironically an
activity about which each feels differently brings them both
together.
Lastly, we turn our attention to the title of the poem. The phrase
“mending fences” refers of course to repairing relationships, but in
the half-century before the poem's publication also came to refer
more specifically to the idea of looking after one's political interests
(Safire, 1993, p. 243). Frost's poem shows us how these two
seemingly opposed ideas are mutually constitutive. To mend relationships (and tolerate our own internal differences) is to look
after one's own interests and looking after one's own interests often
involves mending relationships with others as well as learning to
tolerate one's own internal difference. While not everyone agrees
that bordering with walls and mending relationships are compatible activitiesdand this may well depend in large part on one's
ideological perspectivedwe want to go as far down the road with
Frost as we can, holding open the possibility of “mending fences” in
both senses of the phrase.
Extending internal ambivalence to geography, Jones (2009)
suggests that while we need common categories to help us make
sense of a complex world, and even though we acknowledge their
social constructedness, we still have difficulty moving beyond
them. The problem, he writes, “is not the categories themselves,
but, rather, the way the boundaries around the categories are
cognitively understood as closed and fixed even when we know
intellectually that they are open and fluid” (p. 175). Understanding
categorized phenomena as “only partially formed and incomplete”
or inchoate (Jones, 2009, p. 174) is also a means of interpreting
Frost's “Mending Wall.” For Frost, the process of building, tearing
down, and re-building objective or subjective barriers is itself an
inchoate and fuzzy processdnote that the title of the poem is a verb
formdthat is quite open and fluid. Note also that the meaning
shifts whether one reads “mending” as a present participle, as in
“we were mending walls” or a gerund, as in “the wall can be used
for mending.” If mending is a process here, perhaps even a healing
one, then perhaps we can also consider some forms of “bordering”
as necessary, ongoing, and progressive if non-utopian processes.
This is a difficult proposition, but one geographers must take
seriously.
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
5. Cellularity: Frost beyond the poem
Frost seems to have recognized that our ambivalence regarding
borders is tied up with a received ambivalence about natureculture division more generally, a differentiation that inaugurated
and continues to motivate the pastoral poetic tradition in all its
permutations. In his introduction to “Mending Wall,” Frost (1915)
writes that it “takes up the theme where ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ in A
Boy's Will laid it down” (p. 10; see also Frost 1914, p. 10). That earlier
poem, perhaps a metaphor for the act of poetic creation, shows how
work in isolation (nature) can be transformed into a deep realization of interconnectedness. Whereas “The Tuft of Flowers” explicitly considers collective labor through “fellowship” (Frost, 1913; pp.
ix, 34e36), the message in “Mending Wall” appears to be one of
conflict. Monteiro (1973) argues that in the latter poem exchange
between the two characters is cut off by recalling a proverb of
ancient wisdom, the weight of which causes communication to
break down “even as men converse” (p. 468). The implication is
that rehearsed or received speech is about as useful as non-speech.
Seen from a geographic perspective, “The Tuft of Flowers” is about a
spatial connection despite temporal discontinuity whereas
“Mending Wall” is about political, social, and temporal/generational alienation despite a synchronous spatial connection. While
Faggen (1997) writes that in “Mending Wall” the wall itself, like the
tuft of flowers, serves as “that which binds, bringing humans
together in work and play while also keeping them separate” (p.
131), we read “Mending Wall” as rather a space of ambivalent accommodation, a place of ongoing negotiation of internal and
external difference.
Some of Frost's other poems also incorporate the theme of
borders and fences. It is worth considering “The Cow in Apple
Time” (a rebuke to those not respecting walls and boundaries,
interpreted as a critique of imperialism gone awry; Frost, 1949, p.
157; Woznicki, 2001, p. 67), “Trespass” (a legal and moral affirmation of property boundaries; Frost, 1949, p. 503; Monteiro, 2001, p.
372), and “Triple Bronze” (personal, property, and national defenses
to which we retreat in order to ensconce ourselves from others and
the complexity of the universe; Frost, 1949, p. 468; Pearce, 2001, p.
374). In these poems the distinct scales of the personal and the
national are inter-related (Faggen, 1997, p. 129). Although when
taken individually they may appear to be an affirmation of
boundaries, these poems also subtly question the role of such
limiting structures. In the first poem wall-builders are “fools”
against whom one naturally rebels even if such freedoms have
adverse consequences. In “Trespass” the liberties taken by an uninvited visitor seem strangely understandable even if unwelcome.
Finally, in “Triple Bronze” boundaries may make the world
manageable, but they also implicitly cut us off from much of what it
has to offer.
By foregrounding the ways in which Frost continually thematizes borders and boundaries, ambivalence itself is highlighted.
Even in a strident defense of fences and borders, Frost acknowledges a critique of these social and physical constructions. More so
than in his published poems, this ambivalence is reflected in a
notebook entry likely made between 1950 and 1962 wherein Frost
toyed with writing a sequel to the poem:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall
Something there is that does and after all
Oh guileless children house and pastures
[illegible] Cant you be taught [illegible phrase] {that since the
world began}
All life upon it has been [illegible] celular
89
[illegible]
[illegible]
Inside and outside, cells are are all we are (Faggen, 2006, p. 612;
modified in consultation with Frost, ca. 1950e1962, p. 23v)
This fragment affords a glimpse into Frost's ambivalence,
apparently partially driven by his understanding that we are all
interconnected or “cellular.” In The Notebooks of Robert Frost as
transcribed and published by Faggen (2006), there are five additional references to life as cellular in nature. Given the ubiquity of
“natural” explanations of social phenomena in the early twentieth
century (e.g. Freud, Darwin), it is not surprising that Frost turns to
the idea of cells to reflect a basic premise of existence (for an
analysis of Frost's lifelong interest in science and the impact this
had on his poetry see Faggen, 1997; regarding cultivation of the idea
that the physical world mirrors the metaphysical see Thompson,
1966, pp. 70e71). “All life is cellular,” he wrote, “within the body
of a man and outside his world is the body of society. One chief
disposition of life living is cell walls breaking and cell walls
breaking making” (circa 1930e1940, Faggen, 2006, p. 281). In an
undated notebook he repeated and elaborated: “All life is cellular.
No living particle of matter however small has yet been found
without a skindwithout a wall” (Faggen, 2006, p. 638).
It appears that by making a parallel to what he saw as science's
ultimate foundations, Frost viewed borders and boundaries in a
similar light. Frost also made reference to this analogy in a 1955
discussion and extended the cell reference to reflect a common
humanity between ourselves and the ultimate Other of his time,
Communists:
I've got a man there; he's both [of those people but he's mandboth
of them, he's] a wall builder and a wall toppler. He makes
boundaries and he breaks boundaries. That's man. And all human
life is cellular, outside or inside. In my body every seven years I'm
made out of different cells and all my cell walls have changed. I'm
cellular within and life outside is cellular. Even the Communists
have cells. [Laughter] That's where I've arrived at that. (Cook, 1974,
pp. 82e83)
As reported by The New York Times in 1957 Frost suggested a
further embrace: “All life is cellular. We live by the breaking down
of cells and the building up of new cells. Change is constant and
unavoidable. That is the way it is with human beings and with
nations, so why deplore it?” (Lathem, 1966, p. 179). Just as this basic
unit of biology helped Frost understand walls and fences, the rustic
fence on his New Hampshire farm helped him better understand
“the world and finally the universe” (Fleissner, 1988, p. 66).
In a related theme that runs throughout his notebooks Frost
commented at least eleven times on separateness and connection
as intertwined ideas: “The separateness of the parts is as important
as the connection {of the parts}. True in a poem and true in
[illegible] society” (written between 1909 and 1950; Faggen, 2006,
p. 52). All of these entries are organized with a similar sentence
structure wherein connectivity is assumed and it is the separateness that needs to be justified (cellularity at the level of syntactic
form). Similarly, in “Mending Wall” the natural state of thingsdso
much a part of the universal fabric of life as to be simply referenced
as “something there is”dseems to be constantly at odds against
internal and external divisions, changes, and disruptions. Reading
the poem in this way, we see that for the so-called antagonist in the
poem (remember that Frost claims to be both fellows) change
itselfd disruption and differencedis threatening. For the narrator,
on the other hand, change is an inherent part of the human
90
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
condition and part of the essence of the natural world. Such a
comparison is the ultimate argument for both the removal and the
maintenance of walls in political and social life. As Frost (2001)
once elaborated, we cannot have internationalism without first
having nationalism (p. 93). And while we by no means wish to call
for more or greater forms of separation, we do suggest that the
edges of nation-states or neighborhoods may indeed be no more or
less police-able, negotiable, or stable than the walls of cells. We also
argue that it is only by acknowledging our own personal and political ambivalence concerning bordering that we can respond
ethically towards the other.
Finally as much as we understand Frost's attraction to the cell as
a metaphor for division, like all biologisms it has a tendency to
obscure the historical causes, conditions, and multiple determinations of its subject. We also acknowledge that metaphors
are unstable signifiers, something Frost (2001) seems to have understood (p. 91). Metaphors rely on analogies to a world that is
constantly in flux and thus poems (like all artworks) must always
be historicized. Yet this seems to us a strength rather than a
weakness. We believe that poems are more than mere representations of the world beyond our immediate empirical understanding. They offer new perspectives on experience, affording new
views through the cracks and fissures of our thinking. It is this
dynamic that we believe helps explain the enduring appeal of
“Mending Wall” to border scholars as well as to the general public.
6. Conclusion
Frost once wrote that “A poem can afford to be misunderstood
somewhat if it is going to be a long time here” (Faggen, 2006, p. 675).
The value of the aesthetic is that it often seems to reflect universal
values that transcend particular circumstances. We believe that this
is also its main danger. Refusing Frost's ambivalence means reading
the poem as though it were a mirror, finding in it evidence of one's
own ideas about contemporary borders and boundaries. Just as
practicing politics via polemics can be a dubious (even if common)
means of exerting power, however, turning poems into aphorisms
can be a questionable way to read poetry, one that downplays the
internal debates that are otherwise present, and disavows ambivalence and difference. Frost helps us see that if we want a better
understanding of political borders we must recognize the ways in
which ambivalence intervenes not only at the level of the individual
psyche, but also in our political and critical discourse. He helps us
recognize that even our deepest-held political beliefsdseemingly so
powerful, self-evident, and eternaldare, like the wall in the poem,
continuously subject to gaps and reformations.
In this article we have reviewed the ways in which Frost's poem
is referenced in the study of contemporary borders and more
closely examined the poem itself with a particular focus on what
we can learn in a political sense from this ambivalence. Frost
himself resisted definitive interpretations so as to leave his work
open to newfound relevance and insight (Faggen, 2006, p. xv). By
providing a fuller understanding of the poem, its context, and its
strategic use of ambivalence we have provided innovative opportunities for learning from “Mending Wall” as it relates to the study
of contemporary borders in political geography. Furthermore, the
ideas discussed are relevant anywhere conflict in discourse
threatens to diminish political discussion.
In our view, Frost's poem “Mending Wall” should be read
neither as a wholesale critique of the neighbor, nor as an idealization of the speaker, but rather as a dramatization of a deeper
ambivalence. Respect toward others' perspectives and our own
internal dissension cannot be forced and so ambivalence in
“Mending Wall” is enacted rather than argued. Frost would rather
we come to that point voluntarily, that we grasp it for ourselves.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Elisabeth
Vallet for the opportunity to present this
paper in draft form at the 2013 Borders, Walls and Security con du Que
bec al and also to Eric
ference at the Universite
a Montre
Magrane for including us in the 2014 AAG session on geopoetics.
Portions of this paper were also presented at the 2013 meeting of
the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society and
the 2015 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of
Romanticism. Special thanks as well to Reece Jones for closely
reviewing an early version of this paper. Finally, appreciation is
extended to the editors and anonymous reviewers who provided
additional suggestions for improving the final published form of
this paper.
References
Alexander, N., & Cooper, D. (2013). Poetry & geography: Space & place in post-war
poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Althusser, L. (1990). Contradiction and overdetermination (B. Brewster, Trans.). In
For Marx. New York: Verso (Original work published 1965).
Axelrod, S. G. (2003). Elizabeth Bishop and containment policy. American Literature,
75(4), 843e867.
Beach, J. W. (1953). Robert Frost. The Yale Review, XLIII, 204e217, 2 Dec.
Bergson, H. (1988). Matter and memory (N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, Trans.). New
York: Zone Books.
Best, S., & Marcus, S. (2009). Surface reading: An introduction. Representations, 108,
1e21.
Bhabha, H. (2004). The location of culture. New York: Routledge (Original work
published 1994).
Bidney, M. (2002). The secretive-playful epiphanies of Robert Frost: Solitude,
companionship, and the ambivalent imagination. Papers on Language and
Literature, 38(3), 270e294.
Buchholz, H. (1994). The inner-German border: Consequences of its establishment
and abolition. In C. Grundy-Warr (Ed.), Eurasia: World boundaries (vol. 3, pp.
55e62). New York: Routledge.
Burnshaw, S. (1986). Robert Frost himself. New York: George Braziller.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Casey, E. S. (2011). Border versus boundary at La Frontera. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space, 29(3), 384e398.
Cook, R. L. (1974). Robert Frost: A living voice. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Cramer, J. S. (1996). Robert Frost among his poems: A literary companion to the poet's
own biographical contexts and associations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cresswell, T. (2014). Geographies of poetry/poetries of geography. cultural geographies, 21(1), 141e146.
Davis, R., & Williams, E. (2008). Fences and between fences: Cultural, historical, and
Smithsonian perspectives. Journal of the Southwest, 50(3), 243e261.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Deleuze reader. New York: Columbia University Press.
Original work published 1968.
Di Cintio, M. (2012). Walls: Travels along the barricades. Fredericton, New Brunswick:
Goose Lane Editions.
Dürrschmidt, J. (2006). So near yet so far: Blocked networks, global links and
multiple exclusion in the GermanePolish borderlands. Global Networks, 6(3),
245e263.
Eshun, G., & Madge, C. (2012). “Now let me share this with you”: Exploring poetry as
a method for postcolonial geography research. Antipode, 44(4), 1395e1428.
Faggen, R. (1997). Robert Frost and the challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press.
Faggen, R. (Ed.). (2006). The notebooks of Robert Frost. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press.
Fleissner, R. F. (1988). New lines by Robert Frost: His “addendum” to “Mending
Wall”. English Language Notes, 35(3), 63e66.
Freud, S. (1922). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Freud, S. (1949). Splitting of the ego in the defensive process. In J. Strachey (Ed.),
Collected papers (vol. V, pp. 372e375). London: Hogarth Press. Original work
published 1938.
Frost, R. (1913). A boy's will. London: David Nutt.
Frost, R. (1914). North of Boston. London: David Nutt. http://archive.org/stream/
northofboston00fros#page/n7/mode/2up. Last Accessed 23.11.15.
Frost, R. (1915). North of Boston. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Frost, R. (1949). Complete poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston. “The Cow in Apple Time” originally published 1914; “Trespass” and
“Triple Bronze” originally published 1939.
Frost, R. (ca. 1950e1962). Notebook. Dartmouth College Library, Rauner Special
Collections, Frost M-118, Series 3, Folder 36 (Frost 001880, Faggen 40).
Frost, R. (1956). Robert Frost, Part 3. audio file http://town.hall.org/radio/
HarperAudio/012294_harp_ITH.html. Last Accessed 23.11.15.
K.D. Madsen, D.B. Ruderman / Political Geography 55 (2016) 82e91
Frost, R. (2001). Education by poetry. In S. F. Tropp, & A. P. D'Angelo (Eds.), Essays in
context (pp. 87e93). New York: Oxford University Press. Original work published 1930.
Gerber, P. L. (1982). Robert Frost. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Gibb, C. (1962). Frost's Mending Wall. Explicator, 20(6), 48.
Green, A. (1997). On private madness. London: Karnac Books.
Green, A. (2001). Life narcissism, death narcissism (A. Weller, Trans.). New York: Free
Association Books. Original work published 1983.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Hegel's phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Original work published 1807.
Hoffman, T. (2001). Robert Frost and the politics of poetry. Hanover, NH: Middlebury
College Press.
Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jellissen, S. M., & Gottheil, F. M. (2013). On the utility of security fences along international borders. Defense and Security Studies, 29(4), 266e279.
Johnson, C., Jones, R., Paasi, A., Ammore, L., Mountz, A., Salter, M., et al. (2011).
Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies. Political Geography,
30, 61e69.
Jones, R. (2012, August 27). Something there is that doesn't love a wall. The New
York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/opinion/Border-Fences-inUnited-States-Israel-and-India.html. Last Accessed 23.11.15.
Jones, R. (2009). Categories, borders and boundaries. Progress in Human Geography,
33(2), 174e189.
Klein, M. (1987). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms & A study of envy and
gratitude. In J. Mitchell (Ed.), The selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free
Press, 175e200 & 211e229, Original works published 1946 & 1956.
Lacan, J. (2006). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis (B.
Fink, Trans.). In Ecrits.
New York: Norton. Original work published 1966.
Lamb, V. (2014). “Where is the border?” Villagers, environmental consultants and
the ‘work’ of the Thai-Burma border. Political Geography, 40, 1e12.
Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on otherness (J. Fletcher, Trans.). New York: Routledge.
Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The language of psychoanalysis (D. NicholsonSmith, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Lathem, E. C. (1966). Interviews with Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell. Original work published 1974.
Levinson, M. (2007). What is new formalism? PMLA, 122(2), 558e569.
Lippmann, W. (1947). The Cold War: A study in U.S. foreign policy. New York: Harper
& Brothers Publishers.
Magrane, E. (2015). Situating geopoetics. Geohumanities, 1(1), 86e102.
Mahoney, C. (2012). Greater romantic lyric. In F. Burwick, N. Moore Goslee, &
D. Long Hoeveler (Eds.), The encyclopedia of romantic literature (pp. 538e546).
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Marston, S. A., & De Leeuw, S. (2013). Creativity and geography: Toward a politicized
intervention. Geographical Review, 103(2). iiiexxvi.
Marston, S. A., Jones, J. P., III, & Woodward, K. (2005). Human geography without
scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS, 30(4), 416e432.
Meinig, D. W. (1983). Geography as an art. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers NS, 8(3), 314e328.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New
York: Routledge.
Merry, S. E. (1993). Mending walls and building fences: Constructing the private
neighborhood. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 33, 71e90.
Mieder, W. (2003). “Good fences make good neighbours”: History and significance
of an ambiguous proverb. Folklore, 114(2), 155e179.
Monteiro, G. (1973). Robert Frost's linked analogies. The New England Quarterly,
46(3), 463e468.
Monteiro, G. (2001). Trespass. In N. L. Tuten, & J. Zubizarreta (Eds.), The Robert Frost
91
encyclopedia (p. 372). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Montgomery, M. (1958). Robert Frost and his use of barriers: Man vs nature toward
God. South Atlantic Quarterly, 57(3), 339e353.
Morrissey, L. J. (1988). “Mending wall”: The structure of gossip. English Language
Notes, 35(3), 58e63.
Morton, T. (2002). Why ambient poetics? Outline for a depthless ecology. Wordsworth Circle, 33(1), 52e56.
Mountz, A. (2013). Political geography I: Reconfiguring geographies of sovereignty.
Progress in Human Geography, 37(6), 829e841.
Newman, D., & Paasi, A. (1998). Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world:
Boundary narratives in political geography. Geopolitics, 22(2), 186e207.
Olson, C. (1983). The Maximus poems. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olson, C. (1997). Collected prose. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olstad, T. A. (2015). An island, a heron, Jim Harrison, and I: Reading poetry in place.
Geohumanities, 1(1), 171e176.
Parker, N., Vaughn-Williams, N., et al. (2009). Lines in the sand? Towards an agenda
for critical border studies. Geopolitics, 14, 582e587.
Pearce, J. (2001). Triple Bronze. In N. L. Tuten, & J. Zubizarreta (Eds.), The Robert Frost
encyclopedia (p. 374). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Poirier, R. (1990). Robert Frost: The work of knowing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Potkay, A. (2011). Ear and eye: Counteracting senses in loco-descriptive poetry. In
C. Mahoney (Ed.), A companion to romantic poetry (pp. 176e194). Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Richardson, M. (1997). The ordeal of Robert Frost: The poet and his poetics. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Safire, W. (1993). Safire's new political dictionary: The definitive guide to the new
language of politics. New York: Random House.
Sterling, B. L. (2009). Do good fences make good neighbors? What history teaches us
about strategic barriers and international security. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.
Sundberg, J. (2008). ‘Trash-talk’ and the production of quotidian geopolitical
boundaries in the USAeMexico borderlands. Social and Cultural Geography, 9(8),
871e890.
Thompson, L. (Ed.). (1965). Selected letters of Robert Frost. London: Jonathan Cape.
Thompson, L. (1966). Robert Frost: The early years, 1874e1915. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Till, K. E., Sundberg, J., Pullan, W., Psaltis, C., Makriyianni, C., Celal, R. Z., et al. (2013).
Interventions in the political geographies of walls. Political Geography, 33,
53e65.
Timmerman, J. H. (2002). Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Lewisberg, PA:
Bucknell University Press.
Tomsi
c, S. (2015). The capitalist unconscious: Marx and Lacan. New York: Verso.
Untermeyer, L. (Ed.). (1962). New enlarged pocket anthology of Robert Frost's Poems.
New York: Washington Square Press.
& David, C.-P. (2014). Good fences for good neighbours? States, couples
Vallet, E.,
and walls. In B. Vassort-Rousset (Ed.), Building sustainable couples in international relations: A strategy towards peaceful cooperation (pp. 66e87). New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Vander Ploeg, S. D. (2013). Teaching peace by questioning borders: Donne, Frost,
Kingsolver. The CEA Critic, 75(1), 5e9.
Williams, J. (2003). Territorial borders, international ethics and geography: Do good
fences still make good neighbours? Geopolitics, 8(2), 25e46.
Williams, A. J. (2014). Disrupting air power: Performativity and the unsettling of
geopolitical frames through artworks. Political Geography, 42, 12e22.
Woznicki, J. (2001). The cow in apple time. In N. L. Tuten, & J. Zubizarreta (Eds.), The
Robert Frost encyclopedia (p. 67). Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Zupan
ci
c, A. (2016). Sexual is political? In S. Tomsi
c, & A. Sevnik (Eds.), Jacques
Lacan: Between psychoanalysis and politics. New York: Routledge.