The Poetry Books of Robert Frost

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The Poetry Books of Robert Frost

A Boy's Will(1913)

North of Boston(1914)

Mountain Interval(1916)

New Hamphire(1923)

West-Running Brook(1928)

A Further Range(1936)

A Witness Tree(1942)

Steeple Bush(1947)

In the Clearing(1962)

Masques

A Masque of Reason(1946)

A Masque of Mercy(1947)

Composite Poetry Books of Robert Frost

Selected Poems(1923, 1928, 1934) ★

Collected Poems of Robert Frost(1930, 1939) ★

The Poems of Robert Frost(1946)

Complete Poems of Robert Frost(1949~) ★

The Poetry of Robert Frost(1969~) ★

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The Complete Poetry of Robert Frost

A Boy's Will(1913)

INTO MY OWN ★  
GHOST HOUSE  
MY NOVEMBER GUEST 

LOVE AND A QUESTION  
A LATE WALK ★  
STARS  
STORM FEAR  
WIND AND WINDOW FLOWER 

To THE THAWING WIND  
A PRAYER IN SPRING 

FLOWER-GATHERING  
ROSE POGONIAS  
WAITING  
IN A VALE  
A DREAM PANG  
IN NEGLECT  
THE VANTAGE POINT ★

MOWING  
GOING FOR WATER 

REVELATION 

THE TRIAL BY EXISTENCE  
THE TUFT OF FLOWERS ★

PAN WITH US  
THE DEMIURGE'S LAUGH  
Now CLOSE THE WINDOWS 

IN HARDWOOD GROVES  
A LINE-STORM SONG 

OCTOBER  
MY BUTTERFLY ★ 

RELUCTANCE ★ 

North of Boston(1914)

THE PASTURE ★

MENDING WAL ★L 

THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN ★ 

THE MOUNTAIN ★  
A HUNDRED COLLARS ★  
HOME BURIAL ★  
THE BLACK COTTAGE  ★

BLUEBERRIES  
A SERVANT TO SERVANTS ★ 

AFTER APPLE-PICKING ★  
THE CODE ★  
THE GENERATIONS OF MEN ★ 

THE HOUSEKEEPER  
THE FEAR  
THE SELF-SEEKER ★  
THE WOOD-PILE ★  
GOOD HOURS ★

Mountain Interval(1916)

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN ★

CHRISTMAS TREES ★  
AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT ★

THE EXPOSED NEST  
A PATCH OF OLD SNOW  
IN THE HOME STRETCH ★  
THE TELEPHONE  
MEETING AND PASSING ★  
HYLA BROOK ★  
THE OVEN BIRD  ★ 
BOND AND FREE  
BIRCHES ★  
PEA BRUSH  
PUTTING IN THE SEED ★  
A TIME TO TALK ★  
THE COW IN APPLE TIME  
AN ENCOUNTER  
RANGE-FINDING  
The Hill Wife 

    I. LONELINESS  
   II. HOUSE FEAR 

   III. THE SMILE  
   IV. THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM 

   V. THE IMPULSE  

THE BONFIRE  
A GIRL'S GARDEN ★
LOCKED OUT  
THE LAST WORD OF A BLUEBIRD 

"OUT, OUT—"  ★
BROWN'S DESCENT  
THE GUM-GATHERER ★

THE LINE-GANG

THE VANISHING RED

SNOW

THE SOUND OF TREE

New Hamphire(1923)

NEW HAMPSHIRE ★
A STAR IN A STONE BOAT  
THE CENSUS-TAKER ★  
THE STAR-SPLITTER 

MAPLE ★  
THE AX-HELVE ★
THE GRINDSTONE 

PAUL'S WIFE  
WILD GRAPES ★

Two Witches  
    I. THE WITCH OF COOS

    II. THE PAUPER WITCH OF GRAFTON

AN EMPTY THREAT

A FOUNTAIN, A BOTTLE, A DONKEY'S EARS, AND SOME BOOKS  
I WILL SING YOU ONE-0  
FRAGMENTARY BLUE  
FIRE AND ICE  
IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD  
DUST OF SNOW  
To E.T.  
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY  
THE RUNAWAY 

THE AIM WAS SONG

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING ★

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING ★

BLUE-BUTTERFLY DAY

THE ONSET

To EARTHWARD

GOOD-BY AND KEEP COLD

Two LOOK AT TWO ★

NOT TO KEEP

A BROOK IN THE CITY

THE KITCHEN CHIMNEY

LOOKING FOR A SUNSET BIRD IN WINTER

A BOUNDLESS MOMENT

EVENING IN A SUGAR ORCHARD

GATHERING LEAVES

THE VALLEY'S SINGING DAY

MISGIVING

A HILLSIDE THAW

PLOWMEN

ON A TREE FALLEN ACROSS THE ROAD

OUR SINGING STRENGTH

THE LOCKLESS DOOR

THE NEED OF BEING VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS ★

West-Running Brook(1928)

SPRING POOLS ★

THE FREEDOM OF THE MOON

THE ROSE FAMILY

FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN

ATMOSPHERE  
DEVOTION  
ON GOING UNNOTICED  
THE COCOON  
A PASSING GLIMPSE  
A PECK OF GOLD  
ACCEPTANCE  
ONCE BY THE PACIFIC  
LODGED  
A MINOR BIRD  
BEREFT  
TREE AT MY WINDOW  
THE PEACEFUL SHEPHERD  
THE THATCH  
A WINTER EDEN  
THE FLOOD  
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT ★
THE LOVELY SHALL BE CHOOSERS 

WEST-RUNNING BROOK ★  
SAND DUNES  
CANIS MAJOR  
A SOLDIER  
IMMIGRANTS  
HANNIBAL  
THE FLOWER BOAT  
THE TIMES TABLE  
THE INVESTMENT  
THE LAST MOWING  
THE BIRTHPLACE  
THE DOOR IN THE DARK 

DUST IN THE EYES  
SITTING BY A BUSH IN BROAD SUNLIGHT

THE ARMFUL  
WHAT FIFTY SAID  
RIDERS  
ON LOOKING UP BY CHANCE AT THE CONSTELLATIONS  
THE BEAR  
THE EGG AND THE MACHINE 

A Further Range(1936)

Taken Doubly

A LONE STRIKER 

Two TRAMPS IN MUD TIME  ★ 
THE WHITE-TAILED HORNET  
A BLUE RIBBON AT AMESBURY  
A DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK  
THE GOLD HESPERIDEE  
IN TIME OF CLOUDBURST  
A ROADSIDE STAND  
DEPARTMENTAL  
THE OLD BARN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FOGS  
ON THE HEART'S BEGINNING TO CLOUD THE MIND  
THE FIGURE IN THE DOORWAY  
AT WOODWARD'S GARDENS  
A RECORD STRIDE 

Taken Singly 

LOST IN HEAVEN  
DESERT PLACES ★
LEAVES COMPARED WITH FLOWERS

A LEAF-TREADER  
ON TAKING FROM THE TOP TO BROADEN THE BASE  
THEY WERE WELCOME TO THEIR BELIEF  
THE STRONG ARE SAYING NOTHING 

THE MASTER SPEED  
MOON COMPASSES  
NEITHER OUT FAR NOR IN DEEP  
VOICE WAYS  
DESIGN ★  
ON A BIRD SINGING IN ITS SLEEP 

AFTERFLAKES  
CLEAR AND COLDER  
UNHARVESTED  
THERE ARE ROUGHLY ZONES  
A TRIAL RUN  
NOT QUITE SOCIAL  
PROVIDE, PROVIDE  

Ten Mills

Ten Mills
I. PRECAUTION  
II. THE SPAN OF LIFE  
III. THE WRIGHTS' BIPLANE  
IV. EVIL TENDENCIES CANCEL  
V. PERTINAX  
VI. WASPISH  
VII. ONE GUESS  
VIII. THE HARDSHIP OF ACCOUNTING 

IX. NOT ALL THERE  
X. IN DIVES' DIVE  

The Outlands

THE VINDICTIVES  - The Andes

THE BEARER OF EVIL TIDINGS - The Himalayas
IRIS BY NIGHT - The Malverns(but these are only hills)

Build Soil

BUILD SOIL
To A THINKER  

Afterthought

A MISSIVE MISSILE 

A Wittness Tree(1942)

BEECH  
SYCAMORE  

One or Two

THE SILKEN TENT ★  
ALL REVELATION  
HAPPINESS MAKES UP IN HEIGHT FOR WHAT IT LACKS IN LENGTH 

COME IN ★
I COULD GIVE ALL TO TIME  
CARPE DIEM  
THE WIND AND THE RAIN  
THE MOST OF IT  
NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRDS' SONG BE THE SAME  
THE SUBVERTED FLOWER  
WILLFUL HOMING  
A CLOUD SHADOW  
THE QUEST OF THE PURPLE-FRINGED  
THE DISCOVERY OF THE MADEIRAS

Two or More

THE GIFT OUTRIGHT  
TRIPLE BRONZE  
OUR HOLD ON THE PLANET  
To A YOUNG WRETCH  
THE LESSON FOR TODAY 

Time Out

TIME OUT

To A MOTH SEEN IN WINTER

A CONSIDERABLE SPECK

THE LOST FOLLOWER

NOVEMBER

THE RABBIT-HUNTER

A LOOSE MOUNTAIN

IT Is ALMOST THE YEAR Two THOUSAND

Quantula

IN A POEM

ON OUR SYMPATHY WITH THE UNDER DOG

A QUESTION

BOEOTIAN

THE SECRET SITS

AN EQUALIZER

A SEMI-REVOLUTION

ASSURANCE

AN ANSWER

Over Back

TRESPASS

A NATURE NOTE

OF THE STONES OF THE PLACE

NOT OF SCHOOL AGE

A SERIOUS STEP LIGHTLY TAKEN

THE LITERATE FARMER AND THE PLANET VENUS

Steeple Bush(1947)

Steeple Bush

A YOUNG BIRCH

SOMETHING FOR HOPE

ONE STEP BACKWARD TAKEN

DIRECTIVE ★

Too ANXIOUS FOR RIVERS

AN UNSTAMPED LETTER IN OUR RURAL LETTER BOX

To AN ANCIENT

Five Nocturnes

Five Nocturnes

   I. THE NIGHT LIGHT

  II. WERE I IN TROUBLE

 III. BRAVADO

 IV. ON MAKING CERTAIN ANYTHING HAS HAPPENED 

 V. IN THE LONG NIGHT  
A MOOD APART  

A Spire and Belery

THE FEAR OF GOD  
THE FEAR OF MAN  
A STEEPLE ON THE HOUSE 

INNATE HELIUM  
THE COURAGE TO BE NEW  
IOTA SUBSCRIPT  

Out and Away

THE MIDDLENESS OF THE ROAD 

ASTROMETAPHYSICAL  
SKEPTIC  
Two LEADING LIGHTS  
A ROGERS GROUP  
ON BEING IDOLIZED  
A WISH TO COMPLY  
A CLIFF DWELLING  
IT BIDS PRETTY FAIR  
BEYOND WORDS  
A CASE FOR JEFFERSON 

LUCRETIUS VERSUS THE LAKE POETS

Editorials

HAEC FABULA DOCET 

ETHEREALIZING  
WHY WAIT FOR SCIENCE 

ANY SIZE WE PLEASE  
AN IMPORTER  
THE PLANNERS  
No HOLY WARS FOR THEM 

BURSTING RAPTURE  
U. S. 1946 KINGS X  
THE INGENUITIES OF DEBT  
THE BROKEN DROUGHT 

To THE RIGHT PERSON 

An Afterword

TAKE SOMETHING LIKE A STAR (Complete Poems of Robert Frost)

Closed For Good 

FROM PLANE TO PLANE (Complete Poems of Robert Frost)

In the Clearing(1962)

POD OF THE MILKWEED  
AWAY!  
A CABIN IN THE CLEARING  
CLOSED FOR GOOD  
AMERICA IS HARD TO SEE  
ONE MORE BREVITY  
ESCAPIST—NEVER  
FOR JOHN F. KENNEDY HIS INAUGURATION 

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE  
A NEVER NAUGHT SONG  
VERSION  
A CONCEPT SELF-CONCEIVED 

KITTY HAWK ★
AUSPEX  
THE DRAFT HORSE  
ENDS  
PERIL OF HOPE  
QUESTIONING FACES  
DOES NO ONE AT ALL EVER FEEL THIS WAY IN THE LEAST?  
THE BAD ISLAND—EASTER  
OUR DOOM TO BLOOM  
THE OBJECTION TO BEING STEPPED ON 

A-WISHING WELL  
How HARD IT IS TO KEEP FROM BEING KING WHEN IT'S IN YOU AND IN THE SITUATION 

LINES WRITTEN IN DEJECTION ON THE EVE OF GREAT SUCCESS  
THE MILKY WAY IS A COWPATH  
SOME SCIENCE FICTION  
QUANDARY  
A REFLEX  
IN A GLASS OF CIDER  
FROM IRON  
[FOUR-ROOM SHACK . . .]  
[BUT OUTER SPACE . . .]  
ON BEING CHOSEN POET OF VERMONT  
[WE VAINLY WRESTLE . . .] ★
[IT TAKES ALL SORTS . . .] ★
[IN WINTER IN THE WOODS . . .] ★ 
[FORGIVE, O LORD . . .] ★ 

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CHRONOLOGY 

1874 
Born on March 26 in San Francisco, California to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost Jr. Named Robert Lee Frost after Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Originally from New Hampshire, his father had, as a teenager, run away to join the confederate army before being caught in Pennsylvania and sent home. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, he married the Scottish born Isabelle, who was brought up by her uncle in Ohio. 

1875 
Father named city editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, edited by social reformer Henry George. 

1876 
Sister, Jeanie Florence, is born on June 25 in grandparents’ home in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Returns to San Francisco in late November with mother and sister. Father, already beset by drinking and gambling problems, is diagnosed with consumption. 

1885 
Father dies of tuberculosis on May 5, leaving family only $8 after funeral expenses. Father’s body taken to Lawrence, Massachusetts for burial. Family lives with paternal grandfather, now retired from job as a mill supervisor, and grandmother, a former leader of local suffragist movement. Family goes to Amherst, New Hampshire and stays at farm of great-aunt Sarah Frost. Family returns to Lawrence and Frost is placed in third grade. 

1886 
Family moves to Salem Depot, New Hampshire. Mother begins teaching fifth to eighth grades in the district school. 

1889 
Finishes school year at the head of the class of Lawrence High School. Befriends Carl Burell, an older student, who introduces him to botany, astronomy, and evolutionary theory. 

1890 
Publishes first poem, “La Noche Triste,” based on episode in Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, which appears in the Lawrence High School Bulletin in April. 

1892 
Shares valedictory honors at graduation with Elinor White, and delivers address “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled.” Becomes engaged to Elinor. Enters Dartmouth College instead of Harvard because his grandparents blame Harvard for his father’s bad habits and because it is less expensive. Leaves Dartmouth college at the end of December. 

1893 
Works at the Arlington Woolen Mill in Lawrence, changing carbon filaments in ceiling arc lamps. Lives with mother and sister in Lawrence. 

1894 
Quits job at the mill and begins teaching grades one through six in Salem. Tries unsuccessfully to convince Elinor to marry him. “My Butterfly: An Elegy” published in The Independent and begins correspondence with its literary editor Susan Hayes Ward. 

1895 
Marries Elinor White in Lawrence on December 19 in ceremony conducted by a Swedenborgian pastor. Works as a reporter for Lawrence Daily American and Sentinal. 

1896 
Son Elliot is born on September 25. Helps mother with a new school. 

1897 
Passes Harvard College entrance examinations in Greek, Latin, ancient history, English, French, and physical science. Enters Harvard as a freshman and moves into Cambridge apartment with Elinor, Elliott, and his mother-in-law. 

1899 
Concerned with his own, Elinor’s, and mother’s health, he withdraws from Harvard on March 31. Daughter Lesley is born on April 28. Takes up poultry farming with financial help from his grandfather. 

1900 
Elliott dies of cholera on July 8 and is buried in Lawrence. Frost moves family to 30-Acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Mother dies of cancer on November 2 and is buried in Lawrence. 

1901 
Grandfather William Prescott Frost dies on July 10; wills Frost a $500 annuity and use of the Derry farm for ten years, after which Frost is to be given ownership of the farm. 

1902 
Expands poultry business. Son Carol is born on May 27. 

1903 
Publishes short story “Trap Nests” in The Eastern Poultryman (first of 11 stories and articles published in the Poultryman and Farm-Poultry, 1903–05). Daughter Irma is born on June 27. 

1905 
Daughter Marjorie is born on March 28. 

1906 
Begins full time position teaching English at Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Publishes poem “The Tuft of Flowers” in Derry Enterprise in March. 

1907 
Daughter Elinor Bettina is born on June 18 and dies on June 21, 1907. 

1909 
Publishes poem “Into My Own” in New England Magazine in May. Moves family from the farm to apartment in Derry Village. 

1911 
Accepts teaching position at State Normal School in Plymouth, and teaches courses in education and psychology. Sells the Derry farm in November. 

1912 
Family moves to England for a few years; Frost devotes himself to writing full time. Rents cottage in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, 20 miles north of London. Prepares manuscript of A Boy’s Will and submits it to London publishing firm of David Nutt and Company. 

1913 
A Boy’s Will is published on April 1 and receives several favorable reviews including Ezra Pound’s in Poetry. Through Pound, meets Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”), Ford Hermann Hueffer (Ford Maddox Ford), May Sinclair, Ernest Rhys, and William Butler Yeats. Attends weekly gatherings at homes of T. E. Hulme and Yeats. Forms close mentoring friendship with essayist Edward Thomas. 

1914 
Moves family to Dymock, Gloucestershire. North of Boston published on May 15 by David Nutt and Company to many favorable reviews. Learns that New York publishing firm of Henry Holt and Company will publish his books in the United States. Decides to return to the United States. 

1915 
North of Boston published by Henry Holt on February 20. Frost arrives in New York on February 23. A Boy’s Will is published by Henry Holt in April. Moves to Franconia, New Hampshire in June. Meets poet Edwin Arlington Robinson and poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, who becomes a lifelong friend. Elinor becomes ill during pregnancy and recovers after miscarriage. 

1917 
Family moves to Amherst, Massachusetts in January. Edward Thomas killed by artillery shell in France on April 9 at the battle of Arras. Accepts offer to extend teaching appointment at Amherst. 

1918 
Awarded honorary MA degree by Amherst College in May. Reappointed professor of English. 

1920 
Resigns position at Amherst College in February in dispute with President Meiklejohn over teaching philosophy and to devote more time to writing poetry. Sister Jeanie arrested in Portland, Maine for disturbing the peace; Frost commits her to the state mental hospital. Sells property in Franconia and buys farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont. Begins serving as consulting editor for Henry Holt and Company. 

1921 
Accepts a one-year fellowship in letters at the University of Michigan. 

1923 
Selected Poems is published on March 15. New Hampshire published by Henry Holt on November 15. Accepts new appointment at Amherst College. 

1924 
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire. Receives honorary degrees from Middlebury College and Yale University. Accepts lifetime appointment at University of Michigan as Fellow in Letters. 

1925 
Leaves Michigan in December when daughter Marjorie is hospitalized with pneumonia and a peri-cardiac infection. 

1926 
Accepts offer to return to Amherst as part-time professor of English. Participates in inaugural session of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. 

1927 
Moves to Amherst. Marjorie enters Johns Hopkins Hospital for ten weeks of treatment. 

1928 
Visits Ireland and England, visiting Padraic Colum, George Russell (“AE”), and Yeats. Meets T. S. Eliot for the first time, in London. West-Running Brook is published November 19 by Holt along with an expanded edition of Selected Poems. 

1929 
Sister Jeanie dies in state mental hospital in Augusta, Maine, on September 7. Frost and Elinor move into 150–acre “Gully Farm” in South Shaftsbury, Vermont. 

1930 
Collected Poems published by Holt. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

1931 
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems. 

1934 
Marjorie dies after intensive treatment for fever at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Frost and Elinor go to Key West, Florida under doctor’s orders where they are joined by Carol and his family. 

1936 
A Further Range is published by Holt on May 20. 

1937 
Wins Pulitzer Prize for A Further Range. Elinor undergoes surgery for breast cancer in October. Spends winter with Elinor in Gainesville, Florida. 

1938 
Elinor dies of heart failure in Gainesville on March 20. Frost resigns Amherst position and returns to South Shaftsbury. Kathleen Morrison becomes his secretary and arranges lecture appearances. Moves to Boston in October. 

1940 
Carol commits suicide with a deer-hunting rifle on October 9 in South Shaftsbury. 

1941 
Moves to new home at 35 Brewster Street in Cambridge, spending summers at the Homer Noble Farm and winters in South Miami. Accepts fellowship from Harvard in American Civilization. 

1942 
A Witness Tree is published by Holt on April 23. 

1943 
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for A Witness Tree, becoming the first person to receive the prize four times. Appointed George Ticknor Fellow in the Humanities at Dartmouth College. 

1944 
Daughter Irma afflicted by mental instability separates from husband John Crone. 

1945 
A Masque of Reason is published by Holt in March. Works on A Masque of Mercy during the summer. Returns to Dartmouth as Ticknor Fellow. 

1946 
Irma and her six-year-old son Harold stay with Frost during the summer as her mental condition deteriorates. Modern Library publishes Collected Poems with preface “The Constant Symbol.” 

1947 
T. S. Eliot visits Frost in Cambridge. Steeple Bush is published by Holt on May 28. Frost has Irma committed to the state mental hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, in August. A Masque of Mercy is published by Holt in November. 

1949 
Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949, published by Holt on May 30. 

1950 
US Senate adopts resolution honoring Frost on his seventy-fifth birthday (actually his seventy-sixth). Attends conference held in his honor at Kenyon college. 

1953 
Awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. 

1954 
Attends series of eightieth birthday celebrations including one at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York sponsored by Holt. Travels with Lesley to Brazil as delegate to the World Congress of Writers held in São Paulo in August. 

1957 
Frost, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway sign letter, asking Attorney General Herbert Brownell to drop treason indictment against Ezra Pound. Awarded honorary doctorates by Oxford and Cambridge. Revisits Gloucestershire and Beaconsfield. Returns to US and becomes actively involved in effort to free Ezra Pound. 

1959 
Attends dinner at Waldorf-Astoria in honor of his eighty-fifth birthday. Lionel Trilling’s speech creates controversy reported in The New York Times. 

1960 
Congress passes bill awarding Frost a gold medal in recognition of his work. Testifies before Senate subcommittee in favor of a bill to establish a National Academy of Culture. President-Elect Kennedy invites him to take part in inaugural ceremonies. 

1961 
Writes new poem in heroic couplets for inauguration on January 20. Apparently unable to read it because of glare and recites, instead, “The Gift Outright.” Travels to Israel and Greece under auspices of the State Department and lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Delivers three lectures in Athens. Vermont state legislature names Frost “Poet Laureate of Vermont.” 

1962 
In the Clearing published March 26 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, on his birthday, March 26. At invitation of President Kennedy, travels in late August to the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the State Department. Travels to Gagra on the Black Sea and meets with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Returns to United States and creates controversy when he tells press that Khrushchev “said we were too liberal to fight.” Undergoes prostate operation on December 10. Suffers pulmonary embolism on December 23. 

1963 
Awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry on January 3. Suffers another pulmonary embolism on January 7. Dies shortly after midnight on January 29. Private memorial service is held in the Applet‎on Chapel in Harvard Yard, January 31, and public service is held at Johnson Chapel, Amherst College, on February 17. Ashes are buried in the Frost family plot in Bennington, Vermont on June 16.

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Education by Poetry - Robert Frost

["Education by Poetry" was a talk delivered at Amherst College(1930.11.15) and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly of February 1931. It is from the conclusion of this Piece that Mr. Frost once extracted the text separately printed under the title The Four Beliefs.]

I am going to urge nothing in my talk. I am not an advocate. I am going to consider a matter, and commit a description. And I am going to describe other colleges than Amherst. Or, rather say all that is good can be taken as about Amherst; all that is bad will be about other colleges.

I know whole colleges where all American poetry is barred—whole colleges. I know whole colleges where all contemporary poetry is barred.

I once heard of a minister who turned his daughter—his poetry-writing daughter—out on the street to earn a living, because he said there should be no more books written; God wrote one book, and that was enough. (My friend George Russell, "Æ", has read no literature, lie protests, since just before Chaucer.)

That all seems sufficiently safe, and you can say one thing for it. It takes the onus off the poetry of having to be used to teach children anything. It comes pretty hard on poetry, I sometimes think,—what it has to bear in the teaching process.

Then I know whole colleges where, though they let in older poetry, they manage to bar all that is poetical in it by treating it as something other than poetry. It is not so hard to do that. Their reason I have often hunted for. It may be that these people act from a kind of modesty. Who are professors that they should attempt to deal with a thing as high and as fine as poetry? Who are they? There is a certain manly modesty in that.

That is the best general way of settling the problem; treat all poetry as if it were something else than poetry, as if it were syntax, language, science. Then you can even come down into the American and into the contemporary without any special risk.

There is another reason they have, and that is that they are, first and foremost in life, markers. They have the marking problem to consider. Now, I stand here a teacher of many years’ experience and I have never complained of having had to mark. I had rather mark anyone for anything—for his looks, carriage, his ideas, his correctness, his exactness, anything you please,—I would rather give him a mark in terms of letters, A, B, C, D than have to use adjectives on him. We are all being marked by each other all the time, classified, ranked, put in our place, and I see no escape from that. I am no sentimentalist. You have got to mark, and you have got to mark, first of all, for accuracy, for correctness. But if I am going to give a mark, that is the least part of my marking. Thc hard part is the part beyond that, the part where the adventure begins.

One other way to rid the curriculum of the poetry nuisance has been considered. More merciful than the others it would neither abolish nor denature the poetry, but only turn it out to disport itself, with the plays and games—in no wise discredited, though given no credit for. Any one who liked to teach poetically could take his subject, whether English, Latin, Greek or French, out into the nowhere along with the poetry. One side of a sharp line would be left to the rigorous and righteous; the other side would be assigned to the flowery where they would know what could be expected of them. Grade marks where more easily given, of course, in the courses concentrating on correctness and exactness as the only forms of honesty recognized by plain people; a general indefinite mark of X in the courses that scatter brains over taste and opinion. On inquiry I have found no teacher willing to take position on either side of the line, either among the rigors or among the flowers. No one is willing to admit that his discipline is not partly in exactness. No one is willing to admit that his discipline is not partly in taste and enthusiasm.

How shall a man go through college without having been marked for taste and judgment? What will become of him? What will his end be? He will have to take continuation courses for college graduates. He will have to go to night schools. They are having night schools now, you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They don’t know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They don’t know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They don’t know how to judge a political campaign. They don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable. And metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about. Education by poetry is education by metaphor.

Suppose we stop short of imagination, initiative, enthusiasm, inspiration and originality—dread words. Suppose we don’t mark in such things at all. There are still two minimal things, that we have got to take care of, taste and judgment. Americans are supposed to have more judgment than taste, but taste is there to be dealt with. That is what poetry, the only art in the colleges of arts, is there for. I for my part would not be afraid to go in for enthusiasm. There is the enthusiasm like a blinding light, or the enthusiasm of the deafening shout, the crude enthusiasm that you get uneducated by poetry, outside of poetry. It is exemplified in what I might call "sunset raving." You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is oh’s and ah’s with you and no more.

But the enthusiasm I mean is taken through the prism of the intellect and spread on the screen in a color, all the way from hyperbole at one end—or overstatement, at one end—to understatement at the other end. It is a long strip of dark lines and many colors. Such enthusiasm is one object of all teaching in poetry. I heard wonderful things said about Virgil yesterday, and many of them seemed to me crude enthusiasm, more like a deafening shout, many of them. But one speech had range, something of overstatement, something of statement, and something of understatement. It had all the colors of an enthusiasm passed through an idea.

I would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking. I find some one now and then to agree with me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.

Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the All was—or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and water (we once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All was substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Number of what? number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has held and held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and psychological or the out of the way places of the physical.

The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving. You can see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of the arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.

Let’s take two or three more of the metaphors now in use to live by. I have just spoken of one of the new ones, a charming mixed metaphor right in the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics: that the more accurately you state where a thing is, the less accurately you will be able to tell how fast it is moving. And, of course, everything is moving. Everything is an event now. Another metaphor. A thing, they say, is all event. Do you believe it is? Not quite. I believe it is almost all event. But I like the comparison of a thing with art event.

I notice another from the same quarter. "In the neighborhood of matter space is something like curved." Isn’t that a good one! It seems to me that that is simply and utterly charming—to say that space is something like curved in the neighborhood of matter. "Something like."

Another amusing one is from—what is the book?—I can’t say it now; but here is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to your ideas of free will. It wants to give you back your freedom of will. All right, here it is on a platter. You know that you can’t tell by name what persons in a certain class will be dead ten years after graduation, but you can tell actuarially how many will be dead. Now, just so this scientist says of the particles of matter flying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what individual particles will collide, but you can say in general that a certain number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that the individual particle can come freely. I asked Bohr about that particularly, and he said, "Yes , It is so. It can come when it wills and as it wills; and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable. But it is not so of the action of the mass. There you can predict." He says, "That gives the individual atom its freedom, but the mass its necessity.

Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant metaphor, I acknowledge, though I myself get too tired of the kind of essay that talks about the evolution of candy, we will say, or the evolution of elevators—the evolution of this, that, and the other. Everything is evolution. I emancipate myself by simply saying that I didn’t get up the metaphor and so am not much interested in it.

What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere . Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history. In history, for instance—to show that [it] is the same in history as elsewhere—I heard somebody say yesterday that Aeneas was to be likened unto (those words, "likened unto"!) George Washington. He was that type of national hero, the middle-class man, not thinking of being a hero at all, bent on building the future, bent on his children, his descendents. A good metaphor, as far as it goes, and you must know how far. And then he added that Odysseus should be likened unto Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think that is so good. Someone visiting Gibbon at the point of death, said he was the same Gibbon as of old, still at his parallels.

Take the way we have been led into our present position morally, the world over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a kind of thinking—to speak metaphorically—there is a kind of thinking you might say was endemic in the brothel. It was always there. And every now and then in some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it do so? By suing all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain virtue. It uses honesty, first,—frankness, sincerity—those words; picks them up, uses them. "In the name of honesty, let us see what we are." You know. And then it picks up the word joy. "Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of our ancestors, the Puritans . . . Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of the kill-joy Puritan. . ." You see. "Let us," and so on. And then, "In the name of health . . ." Health is another good word. And that is the metaphor Freudianism trades on, mental health. And the first thing we know, it has us all in up to the top knot. I suppose we may blame the artists a good deal, because they are great people to spread by metaphor. The stage too—the stage is always a good intermediary between the two worlds, the under and the upper,—if I may say so without personal prejudice to the stage.

In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote Scripture, which simply means that the good words you have lying around the devil can use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about my morality. I am not here to urge anything. I don’t care whether the world is good or bad—not on any particular day.

Let me ask you to watch a metaphor breaking down here before you.

Somebody said to me a little while ago, "It is easy enough for me to think of the universe as a machine, as a mechanism."

I said, "You mean the universe is like a machine?"

He said, "No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . . ."

"I think you mean the universe is like a machine."

"All right. Let it go at that."

I asked him, "Did you ever see a machine without a pedal for the foot, or a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger?"

He said, "No—no."

I said, "All right. Is the universe like that?"

And he said, "No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . ."

". . . it is different from a machine," I said.

He wanted to go just that far with that metaphor and no further. And so do we all. All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.

I have heard this ever since I can remember , and ever since I have taught: the teacher must teach the pupil to think. I saw a teacher once going around in a great school and snapping pupils’ heads with thumb and finger and saying, "Think." That was when thinking was becoming the fashion. The fashion hasn’t yet quite gone out.

We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.

Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. It is wrong to anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The only materialist—be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul.

We ask people to think, and we don’t show them what thinking is. Somebody says we don’t need to show them how to think; bye and bye they will think. We will give them the forms of sentences and, if they have any ideas, their they will know how to write them. But that is preposterous. All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

The first little metaphor . . . Take some of the trivial ones. I would rather have trivial ones of my own to live by than the big ones of other people.

I remember a boy saying, "He is the kind of person that wounds with his shield." That may be a slender one, of course. It goes a good way in character description. It has poetic grace. "He is the kind that wounds with his shield."

The shield reminds me—just to linger a minute—the shield reminds me of the inverted shield spoken of in one of the books of the "Odyssey," the book that tells about the longest swim on record. I forget how long it lasted—several days, was it?—but at last as Odysseus came near the coast of Phaeacia, he saw it on the horizon "like an inverted shield."

There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end Odysseus comes ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night under a double olive tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse where it is hard to get fire—I am not quoting exactly—where it is hard to start the fire again if it goes out, they cover the seeds of fire with ashes to preserve it for the night, so Odysseus covered himself with the leaves around him and went to sleep. There you have something that gives you character, something of Odysseus himself. "Seeds of fire." So Odysseus covered the seeds of fire in himself. You get the greatness of his nature.

But these are slighter metaphors than the ones we live by. They have their charm, their passing charm. They are as it were the first steps toward the great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.

The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetry—that is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go but it is the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled tip.

I want to add one thing more that the experience of poetry is to anyone who comes close to poetry. There are two ways of coming close to poetry. One is by writing poetry. And some people think I want people to write poetry, but I don’t; that is, I don’t necessarily. I only want people to write poetry If they want to write poetry. I have never encouraged anybody to write poetry that did not want to write it, and I have not always encouraged those who did want to write it. That ought to be one’s own funeral. It is a hard, hard life, is they say.

(I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don’t know—the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.)

But as I say, there is another way to come close to poetry, fortunately, and that is in the reading of it, not as linguistics, not as history, not as anything but poetry. It is one of the hard things for a teacher to know how close a man has come in reading poetry. How do I know whether a man has come close to Keats in reading Keats? It is hard for me to know. I have lived with some boys a whole year over some of the poets and have not felt sure whether they have come near what it was all about. One remark sometimes told me. One remark was their mark for the year; had to be—it was all I got that told me what I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark, if it came close enough. I think a man might make twenty fool remarks if he made one good one some time in the year. His mark would depend on that good remark.

The closeness—everything depends on the closeness with which you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else. And that will have to be estimated by chance remarks, not by question and answer. It is only by accident that you know some day how near a person has come.

The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays. There are two or three places where we know belief outside of religion. One of them is at the age of fifteen to twenty, in our self-belief. A young man knows more about himself than he is able to prove to anyone. He has no knowledge that anybody else will accept as knowledge. In his foreknowledge he has something that is going to believe itself into fulfilment, into acceptance.

There is another belief like that, the belief in someone else, a relationship of two that is going to be believed into fulfilment. That is what we are talking about in our novels, the belief of love. And the disillusionment that the novels are full of is simply the disillusionment from disappointment in that belief. That belief can fail, of course.

Then there is a literary belief. Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known. There is a common jest, one that always annoys me, on the writers, that they write the last end first, and then work up to it; that they lay a train toward one sentence that they think is pretty nice and have all fixed up to set like a trap to close with. No, it should not be that way at all. No one who has ever come close to the arts has failed to see the difference between things written that way, with cunning and device, and the kind that are believed into existence, that begin in something more felt than known. This you call realize quite as well—not quite as well, perhaps, but nearly as well—in reading as you can in writing. I would undertake to separate short stories on that principle; stories that have been believed into existence and stories that have been cunningly devised. And I could separate the poems still more easily.

Now I think—I happen to think—that those three beliefs that I speak of, the self-belief, the love-belief, and the art-belief, are all closely related to the God-belief, that the belief in God is a relationship you enter into with Him to bring about the future.

There is a national belief like that, too. One feels it. I have been where I came near getting up and walking out on the people who thought that they had to talk against nations, against nationalism, in order to curry favor with internationalism. Their metaphors are all mixed up. They think that because a Frenchman and an American and an Englishman can all sit down on the same platform and receive honors together, it must be that there is no such thing as nations. That kind of bad thinking springs from a source we all know. I should want to say to anyone like that: "Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other’s noses—do all sorts of things. But, first of all, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other."

I should like to use another metaphor on them. I want my palette, if I am a painter, I want my palette on my thumb or on my chair, all clean, pure, separate colors. Then I will do the mixing on the canvas. the canvas where the work of art is, where we make the conquest. But we want the nations all separate, pure, distinct, things as separate as we can make them; and then in our thoughts, in our arts, and so on, we can do what we please about it.

But I go back. There are four beliefs that I know more about from having lived with poetry. One is the personal belief, which is a knowledge that you don’t want to tell other people about because you cannot prove that you know. You are saying nothing about it till you see. The love belief, just the same, has that same shyness. It knows it cannot tell; only the outcome can tell. And the national belief we enter into socially with each other, all together, party of the first part, party of the second part, we enter into that to bring the future of the country. We cannot tell some people what it is we believe, partly, because they are too stupid to understand and partly because we are too proudly vague to explain. And anyway it has got to be fulfilled, and we are not talking until we know more, until we have something to show. And then the literary one in every work of art, not of cunning and craft, mind you, but of real art; that believing the thing into existence, saying as you go more than you even hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion. And then finally the relationship we enter into with God to believe the future in—to believe the hereafter in.

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TO  THE  AMHERST  STUDENT 

When the editors of The Amherst  Student sent greetings to Frost for his "sixtieth" (actually his sixty-first ) birthday in 193S, Frost wrote this  reply,  which  was  printed  in  that  undergraduate  paper  on  2S March, 193S. It is one of his most memorable statements on form as a philosophical  necessity. 

It is very very kind of the Student to be showing sympathy with me for my age. But sixty is only a pretty good age. It is not ad­vanced enough. The great thing is to be advanced. Now ninety would be really well along and something to be given credit for. 

But speaking of ages, you will often hear it said that the age of the world we live in is particularly bad. I am impatient of such talk. We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world's history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this. Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. And so on back through literature.  I say they claimed  the  honor  for their ages. They claimed it rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobi­ lized by God. 

All ages of the world are bad-a great deal worse anyway than Heaven. If they weren't the world might just as well be Heaven at once and have it over with. One can safely say after from six to thirty thousand years of experience that the evident design is a situation here in which it will always be about equally hard to save your soul. Whatever progress may be taken to mean, it can't mean making the world any easier a place in which to save your soul-or if you dislike hearing your soul mentioned in open meet­ing, say your decency, your integrity. 

Ages may vary a little. One may be a little worse than another. Bur it is nor possible to get outside the age you are in to judge it exactly. Indeed it is as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to engorge a  donkey. Witness the many who in the attempt have suffered a dilation from which the tissues and the muscles of the mind have never been able to recover natural shape. They can't pick up anything delicate or small any more. They can't use a pen. They have to use a type­-writer. And they  gape  in agony. They  can  write huge shapeless novels, huge gobs of raw sincerity bellowing with pain and that's all that they can write. 

Fortunately we don't need to know how bad the age is. There is something we can always be  doing without reference to  how good or how bad the age is. There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, bur calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches it's height of form  and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet, might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance, but it is really everybody's sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting. staying, than those lesser ones we throw off like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody's coopera­ tion: a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. For these we haven't to get a team together before we can play. 

The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the back­ ground any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so? Unless we are novelists or economists we don't worry about this confusion; we look out on it  with an  instrument or  tackle it  to  reduce it. It is  partly because we are afraid it might prove too much for us and our blend of democratic-republican-socialist-communist-anarchist party. But it is more because we like it, we were born to it, born used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there. To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing. If I were a Platonist I should have to consider it, I suppose, for how much less it is than every­ thing.

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The Figure a Poem Makes - Robert Frost

(Preface first appeared in Reprinted Edition of "Colledted Poems of Robert Frost, 1939")

This was Frost's favorite preface.  

He wrote it in 1939 for the first and succeeding editiom of his collected poems.

It  contains his most famous and lyrical description of the act of poetic creation. 

Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why can’t we have anyone quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can’t in practice Our lives for it.

Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context—meaning—subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters—particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on meters for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience.

Then there is this wildness where of it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrabonists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same same a subject that shall be fulfilled.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, It assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing.

The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of tune and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature changing to it of the old place where it was organic.

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

R.F.

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The Constant Symbol(1946) - Robert Frost

(An Introtuctory Essay of "The Poems of Robert Frost, 1946")

Through  all  the posturing  of  the prose  here,  Frost  expounds 

his almost  existemial concept  of the  way  a poem transcends its original idea  and  creates  itself  through  the  'very  struggle  with  the  discipline of form.  

Used as  the preface  to the  1946  Modern  Library  edition  of Frost's poems,

it was first published separately in the Atlantic Monthly of October, 1946. 

There seems to be some such folk saying as that easy to understand is contemptible, hard to understand irritating. The implica­tion is that just easy enough, just hard enough, right in the middle, is what literary criticism ought to foster. A glance backward over the past convinces me otherwise. The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid arc easy. The Purgatorio is said to be hard. The Song of Songs is hard. There have been works lately to surpass all records for hard­ness. Some knotted riddles tell what may be worth our trouble. Bur hard or easy seems to me of slight use as a rest either way. 

Texture is surely something. A good piece of weaving takes rank with a picture as decoration for the wall of a studio, though it must be admitted to verge on the any. There is a time of apprenticeship to texture when it shouldn't matter if the stuff is never made up into anything. There may be scraps of repeated form all over it. But form as a whole! Don't be shocking! The title of his first book was Fragments.  The artist has to grow up and coarsen a  little before he looks on texture as not an end in itself. 

There are many other things I  have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority. Poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy-and science, too, for that matter, if it will take the soft impeachment from a friend. Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing. And there is a sense in which all poems are the same old metaphor always. 

Every single poem written regular is a  symbol small  or great of the way the  will  has to  pitch into commitments deeper  and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be  judged for whether any original  intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost; be it in art, politics, school, church, business,  love, or  mar­riage-in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synon­ymous with kept. 

We may speak after sentence, resenting judgment. How can the world know anything so intimate as what we were intending to do? The answer is the world presumes to know. The ruling passion in man is not as Viennese as is claimed. It is rather a  gregarious instinct to keep together by minding each other's business.  Grex rather than sex. 'Ve umst be preserved from becoming egregious. The beauty of socialism is that it will end the individuality that is always  crying  out  mind  your  own  business.  Terence's  answer would  be  all  human  business  is  my business. No  more  invisible means  of support,  no more  invisible  motives,  no  more  invisible anything. The ultimate commitment is giving in to it that an out­ sider may see what we were up to sooner and better than we our­ selves. The bard has said in effect, Unto these forms did  I  com­ mend the spirit. It may take him a year after the act to confess he only betrayed the spirit with a rhymster's cleverness and to forgive his enemies the critics for not having listened to his oaths and pro­testations to the contrary. I had he anything to be true to? Was he true to  it?  Did he use good words?  You  couldn't tell unless  you made out  what idea they were supposed to be  good  for. Every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements. 

Take the President in the White House. A study of the success of his intention might have to go  clear back to when as a young politician, youthfully step-careless,  he made the  choice  between the two parties of our system. He may have stood for a  moment wishing he knew of a third parry nearer the ideal; but only for a moment, since he was practical. And in fact he may have been so little impressed with the importance of his choice that he left his first commitment to be made for him by his friends and rela­ tives. It was only a small commitment anyway, like a kiss. He can scarcely remember how much credit he deserved  personally for the decision it took. Calculation is usually no part in the first step in any walk. And behold him now a statesman so  multifariously closed in on with  obligations  and  answerabilities  that  sometimes he loses his august temper. He might as well have got himself into a sestina royal. 

Or he may be a religious nature who lightly gets committed to a nameable church through an older friend in plays and games at the Y.M.C.A. The next he knows he is in a theological school and next in the pulpit of a Sunday wrestling with the angel for a bless­ ing on his self-defensive interpretation of the Creed.  What of his original intention now? At least he has had the advantage of having it more in his heart than in his head; so that he should have made shift to assert it without being chargeable with compromise. He could go a long way before he had to declare  anything he could be held to.  He began with freedom to squander.  He has to  ac­ knowledge himself in a tighter and righter place. But his courage asked for it.  It would have been the same if he had gone to the North Pole or climbed Everest.  All that concerns us is whether his story was one of conformance or performance. 

There's an indulgent smile I get for the recklessness of the un­necssary commnimnet I made when I came to the first line in the second stanza of a poem in this book "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I was riding too high to care what trouble I incurred. And it was all right so long as I didn't suffer deflection.

The poet goes in like a rope skipper to make the most of his opportunities. If he trips himself he stops the  rope. He is  of our stock and has been brought  up by car to choice of two metres, strict iambic and loose iambic (not to count varieties of the latter). 

He may have any length of line up to six feet. He may use an assortment of line lengths for any shape of stanza like Herrick in "To Daffodils." Not that he is running wild.  His intention is of course a particular mood that won't be satisfied with anything less than its own fulfillment. But it is not yet a thought concerned with what becomes it. One thing to know it by:  it shrinks shyly from anticipatory expression‎. Tell  love beforehand and, as  Blake  says, it loses flow without filling the mould; the cast will be  a  reject. The freshness of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse in turn might be set to music. A poem is  the emotion of having a  thought while  the reader waits a  little anxiously for the success of dawn. The only discipline to begin with is the inner mood that at worst may give the poet a  false starr or two like the almost microscopic filament of cotton that goes before the blunt thread-end and must be picked up first by  the eye of the needle. He must be  entranced to  the exact premonition. No mystery is meant. When familiar friends approach each other in the street both are apt to havc this experi­ence in feeling before knowing the pleasantry they will inflict on each other in passing. 

Probably there is  something between the  mood and  the  vocal imagination (images of the voice speaking) that determines a man's first commitment to metre and length of line. 

Suppose him  to have  written  down "When  in disgrace  with Fortune and men's eyes." He has uttered about as much as he has to live up to in the theme as in the form. Odd how the two advance into the open pari passu.  He has given out that he  will descend into Hades, but he has confided in no one how far before he will turn back, or whether he will turn back at all, and by what jutting points of rock he will pick his way. He may proceed as in blank verse.  Two lines  more,  however,  and he  has  let  himself in for rhyme, three more and he has set himself a stanza. Up to this point his discipline has been the self-discipline whereof it is written in so great praise. The harsher discipline from without is now well begun. He who knows not both knows neither. His wordly commitments  are  now  three  or  four  deep. 

Between  us,  he  was  no doubt bent on the sonnet in the first place from habit, and what's the use in pretending he was a freer agent than he had any ambi­ tion  to  be?  He had  made  most of his  commitments  all  in one plunge. The only suspense he asks us to share with him is in the theme. He goes down, for instance, to a depth that must surprise him as much as it does us. But he  doesn't even have the say of how long his piece will be. Any worry is as to  whether he will outlast or last our the fourteen lines-have to cramp or stretch to come our even-have enough bread for the butter or butter for the bread.  As a  matter of fact,  he gets through  in twelve lines and doesn't know quite what to do with the last two. 

Things like that and worse are the reason the sonnet is so suspect a form and has driven so many to free verse and even to the novel. Many a quatrain is salvaged from a sonnet that went agley. Dobson confesses  frankly  to  having changed  from  one  form to  another after starting: "I intended an Ode and it turned to a Sonnet." Bur he reverses the usual order of being driven from the harder down to the easier. And he has a better excuse for weakness of will than most, namely, Rose. 

Jeremiah, it seems, has had his sincerity questioned because the anguish of his lamentations was tamable to the form of twenty-two stanzas for the twenty-two letters  of the alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet has been kept to the twenty-two letters it came our of Egypt  with, so the number twenty-two means as much form as ever. 

Bur there they go again with the old doubt about law and order. (The communist looks forward  to  a  day of order without law, bless his merciful heart.) To the right person it must seem naive to distrust form as such. The every words of the dictionary are a restriction to make the best of or stay out of and be silent. Coining new words isn't encouraged. We play the words as we find them. We make them do. Form in language is such a disjecred lor of old broken pieces it seems almost as non-existent as the spirit till the two embrace in the sky. They are not to be thought of as en­ countering in rivalry bur in creation. No judgment on either alone counts.  We  see  what whitman's  extravagance  may  have  meant when he said the body was the soul. 

Here is where it all comes out. The mind is a baby giant who, more provident in the cradle than he knows, has hurled  his paths in life all round ahead of him like playthings given-data so-called. They are vocabulary, grammar, prosody, and diary, and it will go hard if he can't find stepping stones of them for his feet wherever he wants to go. The way will be zigzag, but it will be a  straight crookedness like the walking stick he cuts himself in the bushes for an emblem. He will be judged as he does or doesn't let this zig or that zag project him off out of his general direction. 

Teachcr or student or investigator whose chance on these defenseless lines may seize, your pardon if for once I  point you out what ordinarily you would point me out. To some it will  seem strange that I have written my verse regular all this time without knowing till yesterday that it was from fascination with this con­stant symbol I celebrate. To the right person it will seem lucky; since in finding out too much too soon there is danger of arrest. Does anyone believe I would have committed myself to the trea­son-reason-season  rhyme-set  in  my  "Reluctance"  if I  had  been blase enough to know,. that these three words about exhausted the possibilities?  No rhyming dictionary for me to make me face the facts of rhyme. I may say the strain of rhyming is less since I came to see words as phrase-ends to countless phrases just as the syllables ly, ing, and ation are word-ends to countless words. Leave some­ thing to learn later. We'd have lost most of our innocence by forty anyway even if we never went to school a day. 

To the Right Person

In the one state of ours that is a shire, 
There is a District Schoolhouse I admire 
As much as anything for situation. 
There are few institutions standing higher 
This side the Rockies in my estimation— 
Two thousand feet above the ocean level. 
It has two entries for coeducation. 
But there’s a tight shut look to either door 
And to the windows of its fenestration, 
As if to say mere learning was the devil 
And this school wasn’t keeping any more 
Unless for penitents who took their seat 
Upon its doorsteps as at mercy’s feet 
To make up for a lack of meditation.

1946. 10. Atlantic Monthly

* It began à la mode,

   ​I intended an Ode;

  ​But Rose cross'd the road

  ​In her latest new bonnet;

  I intended an Ode;

  And it turned to a Sonnet.

Henry Austin Dobson

** Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

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Other Poems to Read tomorrow

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literary influences - Deirdre Fagan

In the “Paris Review Inter

view with Richard Poirier,” Frost, even when 
pressed by Poirier, finds it difficult, or at least pre

tends to find it difficult, to identify influences for 
his work, except what he had read, such as Latin 
and Greek poetry. Poirier wanted to know whom 
Frost admired, and the poet said coyly that he “was 
the enemy of that theory.” Poirier hoped to find out 
for whom he might have felt an affinity, say, Edwin 
Arlington Robinson or Wallace Stevens, both 
acquaintances of Frost’s. “I don’t know who you’d 
connect me with,” Frost said, dodging the inquiries 
again. He explains that he appreciates certain 
poems rather than the entire work of individual 
poets. He finds a poem he likes in an anthology and 
goes looking for more and finds “[n]othing. Just a 
couple like that and that’s all.” He resists influence 
and comparison. He has fondness for some, but 
that is where he wants to leave it.

Given Frost’s resistance to such categorical asso

ciations, it makes most sense to look to what the 
poet revealed about his influences through his 
poetry and the books he admired. Those sources 
are more telling. While he dodged inquiries about 
how and by whom his style was influenced, he did 
not hesitate to say what writers and works he most 
respected. In the November 30, 1958, issue of the 
Chicago Tribune he offered a list of the five books 
that had meant the most to him: The Old Testa

ment, The Odyssey, the poems of Catullus, Edward 
Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
and John Lloyd Stevens’s Incidents of Travel in 
Yucatan. When asked to contribute to a volume 
edited by Edward Weeks, Books We Like: Sixty-two 
Answers to the Question (1936), he again listed The 
Odyssey as well as Robinson Crusoe; Henry David 
Thoreau’s Walden; the tales of Edgar Allan Poe; 
The Oxford Book of English Verse (presumably the 
1924 edition, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch); 
Modern American and British Poetry, edited by his 
friend Louis Untermeyer; James Fenimore Cooper’s 
The Last of the Mohicans; Anthony Hope’s The Pris

oner of Zenda; Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book;
and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and poems.

Frost was well read, but these lists do not iden

tify influences so much as interests, and his inter

ests were various. He was particularly interested in 
philosophy, above all William James, and in sci

ence. During a reading he once identified the Sci

entific American as the “best magazine in the whole 
world,” though he joked that he was “not taking 
subscriptions for it.” He also identified Charles 
Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) to an 
audience as a “better book” than Darwin’s The Ori

gin of Species (1859) and as one of the “best books 
you don’t read.” He also had a great appreciation 
for Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861). But these 
are scattered and isolated selections.

Frost makes allusions in his poetry to the Bible, 
Greek and Latin poetry, English poetry (especially 
the romantics), American poetry, Greek and Roman 
mythology, Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
Henry David Thoreau, philosophers, mathemati

cians, historians, inventors, sculptors, painters, and 
friends. He draws on American folklore and Mother 
Goose nursery rhymes. His allusions are as various 
as the books he read.

Frost’s early style was marked by those who pre

ceded him. In his “Introduction to the Arts Anthol

ogy: Dartmouth Verse,” he asserts that the poet 
“has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he 
ever read. That can’t be helped,” and it was the 
same for him. Even the title of his first book was 
derived from the refrain in Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth”: “A boy’s will is the 
wind’s will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, 
long thoughts.” The nod to Longfellow demon

strates the kinship Frost felt with earlier American 
writers who also had made the American landscape 
and its themes central to their work. Among these 
was Emily Dickinson, whom Frost admired greatly. 
When courting his future wife, Elinor Miriam 
White, during high school, he presented her with a 
recent posthumously published volume of Dickin

son’s poems. Of contemporary poets, she and 
Edward Rowland Sill were favorites (the second 
book he gave to Elinor was Sill’s), as was Thomas 
Hardy, whom he once referred to as his “man.” He 

shared a kinship with Edward Arlington Robinson, 
made all the more evident by the strain in their 
relationship with each other. He appreciated Wal

lace Stevens, whom he met in Key West, FLORIDA, 
and when Stevens remarked after a long evening of 
drinking that Frost was “too academic,” Frost 
quipped that Stevens wrote “bric-a-brac.” Frost 
criticized Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot but respected 
them both. He mentored and was proud of Edward 
Thomas, his young poet friend who was killed in 
World War I.

Frost was influenced and was an influence, but it 
is difficult to nail down details. In his relationship to 
nature there are evidences of Emerson and Thoreau. 
When receiving the Emerson-Thoreau Gold Medal 
from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 
Frost admitted that Emerson affected him early on 
and that his first thoughts about his own language 
came from Emerson, saying: “I took Emerson’s prose 
and verse as my illustration,” and that Emerson 
“blended praise and dispraise of the country people 
of New Hampshire,” as Frost himself did (“On Emer

son”). But he avoided being too closely tied to Emer

son. There are also hints of Hardy and Dickinson in 
his relationship to nature, though Hardy is more dire 
and Dickinson more romantic. In his “Introduction 
to E. A. Robinson’s King Jasper” Frost also reveals a 
kinship to Robinson. They each had an ear tuned to 
the vernacular and to individual experience. In many 
respects Frost’s mood is closest to Hardy’s and his 
style to Robinson’s, but Frost had such a profound 
influence on American poetry precisely because his 
own influences are hard to pin down.

Frost was not a product of his reading; he was a 
new American product. When he came into his 
own, his verse was distinct and powerful, embed

ding him forever in the American poetic landscape 
not as the influenced but as the influential.