In these chapters I have tried to exploit as fully as possible the literary implications of John Winthrop's initial equation of community and domesticity in American experience. In the course of exploring these implications, Winthrop has sometimes yielded to more formidable influences – Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton – and the ideas and images of his model have frequently given way to the particular ambitions of the artists who followed him. Emily Dickinson's dialogue with Paradise Lost or Thoreau's urgent call for “life” are not conscious responses to Winthrop's understanding of “charity,” but together with the other writers we have considered they help establish the vitality of the domestic vision that Winthrop first expressed and that renews its appeal in the early work of one of the first of our modern writers, Robert Frost.

Richard Poirier has observed that Frost is, among other things, “a great poet of marriage, maybe the greatest since Milton.” Poirier means this comparison as a prelude to his extensive consideration of the role of the “home” in Frost and of Frost's own self-conscious appropriation of the English poetic tradition. But it is a useful comparison on quite specific grounds as well.