'The Slow Smokeless Burning of Decay': Two Literary Wood-Piles in the Works of Melville and Frost

The essay explores the way two major American writers with strong ties to New England used the same symbolic image: that of a long-forgotten wood-pile, one in a poem entitled “The Wood-Pile” and the other in the novel Israel Potter. The landscape of New England, both in its natural elements and in those elements forged by the forces of human history, is shown to have provided the two writers with powerful symbols for their art.