Literature, Theory and Application: Reading Stopping by Woods from Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

The literary communication, unlike our daily ways of communication, is something special, having deeper meanings beyond the literal one, which in turn opens a new window giving us glimpses of certain universal aspects of our lives. Poems, in this respect, seem all the more elusive as having more layers to it than a cursory reading might reveal and Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is no exception to this. Now the question arises – How to know the meaning of a poem (or any other literary text for that matter) that lies beneath its surface? Firstly, it should be pointed out, following the poststructuralist literary critics, that there can never be ‘the meaning’ of a text, but rather multiple meaning can be derived from a single piece and secondly, that derived meaning will depend on which literary theory one is applying to that particular text.