Robert Frost is often categorized as an anti-Romantic writer, that is, as a poet whose poetry contradicts the ideals of Romanticism as embodied in the works of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and others. Simultaneously, he is categorized as an anti-modernist, a poet who has little in common with his contemporaries, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and others. Nevertheless, because modernists declared that modernism was, among other things, the rejection of Romanticism, there can be only partial validity in the claim that Frost was both anti-Romantic and anti-modernist. Instead, as the poems bear out, Frost was at once neither and a bit of both, and one does not have to look far in the poems for substantiation. Whether the reader is "Stopping by Woods" or out among the "Birches," nature and wildness are the gateways to introspection and imagination, even if emotion receives short shrift. At the same time, modernism asserts itself-albeit in traditional poetic form-in poems such as "
After Apple Picking," with its evocation of a transitional state of consciousness; and in "The Death of the Hired Man," "Desert Places," and "Acquainted with the Night" with their experience of alienation, loss, and despair.

It can be inferred that the author judges which of the following characteristics as most clearly defining or epitomizing Romanticism?

A. The reliance on traditional poetic forms
B. The rejection of modernism
C. Nature and wildness as the gateway to introspection and imagination
D. Poems such as "Stopping by Woods" and "Birches"
E. Poems that evoke a transitional state of consciousness



In the passage, what is the primary purpose of the two groups of words in boldface type?

A. The first provides contrast to the sentence that precedes it; the second expands upon and elucidates the sentence that precedes it.
B. The first provides background information that leads up to the argument; the second presents the argument.
C. The first reinforces the argument through contrast; the second explains the argument through explanation and expansion.
D. The first states a position that the argument as a whole contradicts; the second presents the argument.
E. The first provides contrast to the sentence that precedes it; the second provides evidence that supports the argument.