Yale professor Langdon Hammer devotes this Modern Poetry lecture (ENGL 310) to Robert Frost, setting his work against nineteenth-century verse and against contemporaries Eliot and Pound. Hammer traces how Frost positions himself among modernist peers, his poetics of manual work, and his idea of 'the sound of sense,' the notion that a sentence's tone carries meaning independent of its words. He then reads closely through two poems, 'Mowing' and ''Out, Out--,'' tracking how each stages a tension between vernacular speech and inherited poetic form. Later chapters turn to verbal sound, metaphorical association, word choice, and metrical pattern, showing how Frost's formal choices carry argument as much as his subject matter does. Recorded in Spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Yale Courses series, the lecture assumes no prior familiarity with Frost and builds its case directly from the poems on the page.