AOS Discovery: Robert Frost’s Poetry
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” Robert Frost, New York Times, 7th November, 1955
“[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
"[A poem] must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader."
“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 petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.” Robert Frost The Figure a Poem Makes
“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, we being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.” Robert Frost
Frost took pride in not quite keeping to rigid poetic structures. He remarked that a line of poetry “will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.”
In a conversation with friend and author, Cecil Day Lewis, Frost talked about how a poem happens:
LEWIS: I suppose most of us start off in a kind of fog. We have a feeling that there is a poem asking to be written and one makes moves into this fog to see the right direction to follow, but I noticed in the --I think it's in your introduction to your collected poems - you made a difference between the way the scholar works with his accumulation of facts and the way a poet works. I think you said the poet just allows whatever sticks to him to stick to him, like burrs when you walk through a field. But I've been looking into this lately, and it seems to me that - that at a certain stage, at any rate, of their work scholars - I mean historians, philosophers, or scientists - have very much the same imaginative jump as poets do. I think it was Collingwood, the Oxford historian and philosopher, who said that he - he starts in a fog, and he doesn't know what the problem is until he is halfway towards solving it. Well, that is true for us, isn't it - for poets?
FROST: Yes, yes, that's a good description - another good description of a way a poem happens.
LEWIS: Yes.
FROST: But it seems to me there's a difference here about the material. You can see the deliberateness with which the scholar seeks his material after he gets going, but a poet never lives in that way at all. All the best things he ever uses are things he didn't know he was getting when he was getting them. A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair .
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” Robert Frost, New York Times, 7th November, 1955
“[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
"[A poem] must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader."
“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 petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.” Robert Frost The Figure a Poem Makes
“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, we being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.” Robert Frost
Frost took pride in not quite keeping to rigid poetic structures. He remarked that a line of poetry “will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.”
In a conversation with friend and author, Cecil Day Lewis, Frost talked about how a poem happens:
LEWIS: I suppose most of us start off in a kind of fog. We have a feeling that there is a poem asking to be written and one makes moves into this fog to see the right direction to follow, but I noticed in the --I think it's in your introduction to your collected poems - you made a difference between the way the scholar works with his accumulation of facts and the way a poet works. I think you said the poet just allows whatever sticks to him to stick to him, like burrs when you walk through a field. But I've been looking into this lately, and it seems to me that - that at a certain stage, at any rate, of their work scholars - I mean historians, philosophers, or scientists - have very much the same imaginative jump as poets do. I think it was Collingwood, the Oxford historian and philosopher, who said that he - he starts in a fog, and he doesn't know what the problem is until he is halfway towards solving it. Well, that is true for us, isn't it - for poets?
FROST: Yes, yes, that's a good description - another good description of a way a poem happens.
LEWIS: Yes.
FROST: But it seems to me there's a difference here about the material. You can see the deliberateness with which the scholar seeks his material after he gets going, but a poet never lives in that way at all. All the best things he ever uses are things he didn't know he was getting when he was getting them. A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair .
An essay by Robert Frost entitled The Figure a Poem Makes
http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html
Frost’s life and career:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/life.htm
Robert Frost reading his poems:
http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/012294_harp_ITH.html
Under the first title The Road Not Taken:
audio for After Apple-Picking (6:16)
audio for The Tuft of Flowers (8:17)
Under the third title Robert Frost, Part 3
audio for Mending Wall (0:29)
Video of Frost reading Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/18
Video file containing audio of Frost reading Fire and Ice
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlob2v_robert-frost-fire-and-ice_creation
No recordings could be found of Robert Frost reading Home Burial.
A collection of poets and literary critics analysis and appreciation of Frost’s Home Burial.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/burial.htm
The same on Mending Wall
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/wall.htm
The same on After Apple-Picking
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/apple.htm
The same on Fire and Ice
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/fireice.htm
The same on Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/woods.htm
On Frost’s poem The Wood Pile (not one of the prescribed texts) and his discovery of himself as a poet including recurring themes and motifs in his work:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/frost.htm
Any careful reader of Frost's work can point to twenty or thirty of his poems that tell in one form or another what he thought to be the story of his life, the story of a man who ran away from civilization, quitting for his own reasons, and went off into the woods, at the risk of getting lost, and found there something worth taking note of, something that lay at the heart of the mystery, a directive, say, or a star in a stone boat, or a pasture spring, or the song of a darkling thrush -- or a decaying wood-pile. In this, the first of his truly great poems, he finds warmth in observing how the labor of our hands ends in "the slow smokeless burning of decay." The syntax and artistry of this poem's last sentence may embody Robert Frost's discovery of his true mission as a poet.
http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html
Frost’s life and career:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/life.htm
Robert Frost reading his poems:
http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/012294_harp_ITH.html
Under the first title The Road Not Taken:
audio for After Apple-Picking (6:16)
audio for The Tuft of Flowers (8:17)
Under the third title Robert Frost, Part 3
audio for Mending Wall (0:29)
Video of Frost reading Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/18
Video file containing audio of Frost reading Fire and Ice
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlob2v_robert-frost-fire-and-ice_creation
No recordings could be found of Robert Frost reading Home Burial.
A collection of poets and literary critics analysis and appreciation of Frost’s Home Burial.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/burial.htm
The same on Mending Wall
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/wall.htm
The same on After Apple-Picking
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/apple.htm
The same on Fire and Ice
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/fireice.htm
The same on Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/woods.htm
On Frost’s poem The Wood Pile (not one of the prescribed texts) and his discovery of himself as a poet including recurring themes and motifs in his work:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/frost.htm
Any careful reader of Frost's work can point to twenty or thirty of his poems that tell in one form or another what he thought to be the story of his life, the story of a man who ran away from civilization, quitting for his own reasons, and went off into the woods, at the risk of getting lost, and found there something worth taking note of, something that lay at the heart of the mystery, a directive, say, or a star in a stone boat, or a pasture spring, or the song of a darkling thrush -- or a decaying wood-pile. In this, the first of his truly great poems, he finds warmth in observing how the labor of our hands ends in "the slow smokeless burning of decay." The syntax and artistry of this poem's last sentence may embody Robert Frost's discovery of his true mission as a poet.
Discovery Additional Text – G.K. Chesterton “Tremendous Trifles”
This is the first and titular essay of the thirty-nine essays that make up G.K. Chesterton’s book, Tremendous Trifles, first published in 1909. It is a collection of his columns (he wrote some 3000 in total) published by UK newspaper the Daily Mail (a different beast to the one you may know today!).
Tremendous Trifles
Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the book again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe." So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end of him.
Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not come to the end of it yet.
Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls call telling a story.
I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.
I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
A shift of perspective is the key to discovery.
G.K. Chesterton’s introductory and titular essay of his collection Tremendous Trifles critiques the idea that people need to see the world in order to be able to reveal or undertsand truth, instead suggesting that truth can be found by turning one’s attention to what is directly under one’s nose. His allegory about the two boys, Peter and Paul, each granted a wish by a fairy milkman, demonstrates what he believes to be the greater literary or artistic achievement of “making mountains out of molehills.” Chesterton’s employs the idiom “making mountains out of molehills” which usually has the negative connotation of “much ado about nothing” or “storm in in tea cup” to describe what he thinks is the purpose of great stories – to allow the reader to see something very familiar with new eyes, to discover something not previously known. The reference to the Biblical story of Satan taking Jesus to the top of the high peak and showing him all the kindgoms of the earth to tempt him serves to reinforce his comparison made in the fable of Paul – if one makes oneself big and looks down, everything will seem trivial and unimpressive. However, Chesterton uses the story of Peter as an analogy of his own creative process – when one gets down and studies the minitiae, one discovers wonders.
Here is a list of some of the techniques Chesterton employs. For each item listed below:
· Define the term.
· Identify an example of the technique in Tremendous Trifles.
· Explain how the technique is used in your example
· Describe the effect - how does it contribute to the theme of discovering through a shift of perspective?
Fable
Narration
Characterisation
Figurative language
Understatement
Idiom
References to geographical landmarks
Analogy
Imagery
Simile
Metphor
Comparison
Contrast
Biblical reference
Allusion
Description
This is the first and titular essay of the thirty-nine essays that make up G.K. Chesterton’s book, Tremendous Trifles, first published in 1909. It is a collection of his columns (he wrote some 3000 in total) published by UK newspaper the Daily Mail (a different beast to the one you may know today!).
Tremendous Trifles
Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the book again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe." So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end of him.
Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not come to the end of it yet.
Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls call telling a story.
I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.
I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
A shift of perspective is the key to discovery.
G.K. Chesterton’s introductory and titular essay of his collection Tremendous Trifles critiques the idea that people need to see the world in order to be able to reveal or undertsand truth, instead suggesting that truth can be found by turning one’s attention to what is directly under one’s nose. His allegory about the two boys, Peter and Paul, each granted a wish by a fairy milkman, demonstrates what he believes to be the greater literary or artistic achievement of “making mountains out of molehills.” Chesterton’s employs the idiom “making mountains out of molehills” which usually has the negative connotation of “much ado about nothing” or “storm in in tea cup” to describe what he thinks is the purpose of great stories – to allow the reader to see something very familiar with new eyes, to discover something not previously known. The reference to the Biblical story of Satan taking Jesus to the top of the high peak and showing him all the kindgoms of the earth to tempt him serves to reinforce his comparison made in the fable of Paul – if one makes oneself big and looks down, everything will seem trivial and unimpressive. However, Chesterton uses the story of Peter as an analogy of his own creative process – when one gets down and studies the minitiae, one discovers wonders.
Here is a list of some of the techniques Chesterton employs. For each item listed below:
· Define the term.
· Identify an example of the technique in Tremendous Trifles.
· Explain how the technique is used in your example
· Describe the effect - how does it contribute to the theme of discovering through a shift of perspective?
Fable
Narration
Characterisation
Figurative language
Understatement
Idiom
References to geographical landmarks
Analogy
Imagery
Simile
Metphor
Comparison
Contrast
Biblical reference
Allusion
Description