The figure a poem makes by Robert Frost

Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” talks about his own perception of how a poem should be and how people should view a poem.

1. The Figure a Poem Makes - Robert Frost S. Mohan Raj [email protected] 915166076

2. American poet Robert Frost, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry ,  depicted realistic New England life through his poetic language and situations. Born on March 26, 1874. He was a special guest at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Frost became a poetic force and the unofficial ‘poet laureate’ of the United States. He died of complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963. Early Years Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He spent 11 years there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died of tuberculosis. Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts . Frost attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future love and wife, Elinor White.

3. Early Years… Frost attended Dartmouth College for several months. In 1894, he had his first poem, “My Butterfly: an Elegy,” published in  The Independent , a weekly literary journal. Frost married Elinor on Dec 19, 1895, and had their first child, Elliot, in 1896, had their second child, Lesley in 1899. In 1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New Hampshire stayed there for 12 years. Though it was a fruitful time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life. Frost’s first son, Elliot, died of cholera in 1900. After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more children: son Carol (1902), who commit suicide in 1940; Irma (1903), who later developed mental illness; Marjorie (1905), who died in her late 20’s after giving birth; and Elinor (1907), who died just weeks after she was born. Additionally, during that time, Frost and Elinor attempted several endeavors, including poultry farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful. It was during this time Frost acclimated himself to rural life.

4. Public Recognition for Poetry In 1912, Frost moved to England. He was 38 when he printed his first book of poems,  A Boy’s Will , followed by  North of Boston . He met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favourable light and provide significant encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, “The Road Not Taken.” After World War I broke out in August 1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return to America. When Frost arrived back home, he was well-received by the literary world.

5. In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled down on a farm in New Hampshire. Frost began a long career as a teacher at several colleges, reciting poetry to eager crowds and writing all the while. He taught at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan, has a most significant association with Amherst College, where he taught steadily during the period from 1916 to 1938. For a period of more than 40 years beginning in 1921, Frost also spent almost every summer and fall at Middlebury College, teaching English on its campus in Ripton , Vermont. During his lifetime, Frost would receive more than 40 honorary degrees, and in 1924, he was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for his book  New Hampshire . He would subsequently win Pulitzers for  Collected Poems  (1931),  A   Further Range  (1937) and  A Witness Tree  (1943). Elinor died in 1938 diagnosed with cancer and also had had a long history of heart trouble. In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal.  A year later, at the age of 86, Frost was honoured and asked to recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate surgery.

6. 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 any one 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, metre 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 metres -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 metres 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 metre 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. The Figure a Poem Makes - Robert Frost

7. Then there is this wildness whereof 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 aberrationists , 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 metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time 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.

8. 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 time 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.

9. 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 clinging 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 on 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 petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

10. The Figure a Poem Makes Sir Henry Irving said that a good actor makes the mould for his form in the company with which he acts. He cannot fit himself into the mould left by another actor. The figure pleases at the moment for it suggests Robert Frost’s phrase in the preface to the beautiful new volume of “The Collected Poems of Robert Frost”: “The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.” The first line commits the poet and he moves on, surprised himself at the poem that forms. The figure is the same, too, for a poet. He begins in delight and ends in wisdom, and between the beginning and the ending has formed the pattern of the life that a poet lives.

11. Frost has been called a realist and also an idealist. It is one of the several paradoxes of his nature that he is both and neither. His comment—though I think he has never put it in print—has often been quoted as to the kind of realist he is. He does not hand you the potato with all the dirt on it. He scrubs the potato to form. He has said in a talk that he is not an idealist but an “idea- ist .” He has not seen a vision of a perfect world through parting clouds in the sky. He believes in working, with what implements and methods there are, toward the realization of the best ideas you have been able to think through in your mind. He is an individualist, not an institutionalist.

12. A man needs the courage that grows out of his loneliness, he needs the strength he develops by standing alone. All the virtues, for Frost, begin with one and grow from one to two, and two by two. He invites you as a poet, not in groups but singly. “You come, too,” he says in “The Pasture,” a poem that is the foreword poem in each of his collected volumes. The moral in his early poem, “The Tuft of Flowers,” is that no man works alone; but the message of the uncut blossoms that the reaper left comes to the other worker by himself. Frost is not a collectivist. His conception of the adequate man is as self-centred, self-contained, self-directed, but not self-sufficient. Not every man by himself, to himself, for himself; but every man in himself, through himself and from himself. “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

13. The figure is the same for love. That is the secret of a good poem or a good axe helm. It is also the secret of a good poet and a good life. Lovers are by twos and twos and the revolution in America that will count is a one-man revolution. With no arithmetic but twice one is two he, gets in all because somehow every two is one and all the ones make together with the sum of the whole. That is a paradox, also, that the institutionalist cannot resolve. Emerson said in effect somewhere that a general’s philosophy is more important than the number of his troops. A man is what he believes, he meant. I think Frost would judge a man by what he loves. What counts is what begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The obligations, the requirements, the other person’s standards are not what matters. The test of this view is in his poems almost anywhere. Home is not “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” it is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” It’s yours by force of love or something like it, for loyalty is a degree of love.

14. Perhaps an understanding of Robert Frost’s philosophy of every man’s right to his own life and his way of life is the best explanation of his position in the United States today. Foremost living American poet and, since Yeats’ death, first of living poets of the English tongue, he stands neither as a great national figure nor even as a great symbol, as Yeats did. He stands as a great and individual figure of a man and a poet. He seems even a lonely figure. Yet, he has friends everywhere. He belongs to no group, he has established no cult. We shall not say “After Frost,” as they say “After Pound” or “After Eliot.” But his “tuft of flowers” gladdens and will gladden the hearts separately of thousands who never heard the sound of his scythe. An understanding of him begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love. That is the figure, too, that a poet makes.

15. Paragraphs 1-3 Frost opens in the middle of a battle against what he calls “abstraction”, long accepted as part of the philosophic method but now – in the first half of the 20 th  century – “a new toy” in the hands of poets. This idea occupies the opening 3 paragraphs of the essay. It is the temptation to separate the constituent elements of a poem and to elevate or prioritize one over all others. Frost’s faux-infantile tone here suggests he will not be offering any approval of this method (“Why can’t we have anyone quality of poetry we choose by itself? . . . Our lives for it.”). He floats the idea of focusing only on the sound a poem makes – “sound is the gold in the ore”. He’s thinking of the experiments in the sound of a Mallarme, a Tennyson, or a Swinburne, the lush aestheticism of a few years before. It may also be relevant that, in the UK, Dylan Thomas’ early work had appeared in the mid-1930s.

16. Paragraphs 1-3… Frost’s doubts about such approaches to poetic composition take a surprising form. From the premise that “the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other” he argues that a reliance solely on linguistic and formal elements (“that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre”) is never going to be enough to achieve this aim. If we abstract for use only the sonic and formal elements of poetry, “(a) ll that can be done with words is soon told”. Frost is known for his interest in form (as against other Modernists’ scepticism about it) so it’s with some surprise that we hear him say: “So also with metres – particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many (more varieties of metre) were still poor if they depended on metres 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”.

17. Paragraphs 1-3… With this Frostian chuckle, it’s clear that only monotony results from this approach and also that the poet can only gain relief from it with “the help of context-meaning-subject matter”. This clumsy, composite term is quickly honed down to the single word “meaning” (later in this essay he uses “theme” and “subject” to refer to the same thing). This is Frost’s argument against the lure of abstraction. The poet – even merely to achieve poems which sound as different as possible from each other – must have something to say, must mean something. The limits of pure sound/form can be breached once the meaning is played  across  the sonic/formal qualities of language. For me, this gives rise to images of a jazz soloist improvising across the rhythms of a band. For Frost: “The possibilities for a tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say”.

18. Paragraphs 1-3… The third paragraph opens: “Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken”. The quasi-Biblical turn of phrase here suggests irony is again at work and it is the second form of abstraction that Frost is mocking. The “wildness” of a poem is the way its component parts are related – or not – to each other. He mocks the kind of “Poem” – notes the ironic upper-case – that results from those who seek “to be wild with nothing to be wild about”. Though the sudden switches of focus, the jump-cuts of strong emotion, the leaps and gulfs of epiphanic moments are certainly (Frost implies) part of great poetry, the Modern( ist ) abstractionist will want the leaps and jumps “pure”.

19. Paragraphs 1-3… Frost is again concerned about the lack of “context-meaning-subject matter” in this kind of poetry. He is taking aim at Surrealism with its reliance on irrational leaps, its dislocation of the senses, the shock value of the illogical. For Frost, such practices lead only “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”. To create poetry that has something to say, Frost suggests for the second time that “Theme alone can steady us down… a subject that shall be fulfilled”.

20. Paragraphs 4–6 The essay now moves away from the constituents of a poem to the process of its writing, a process Frost sees as organic, instinctive, unpredictable, exploratory, holistic, and – like love – an experience and source of pleasure. This is where he uses the title phrase and the figure of a poem turns out to be ‘the course run’ by the poem, its track or trail or locus. The elliptical sequencing of the next few paragraphs doesn’t help the reader but Frost considers 5 areas: the poem’s origins, its development, its impact on writer and reader, the importance of the poet’s freedom.

21. Paragraphs 4–6 … The delight with which a poem begins is “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew”. I don’t think this need be a literal recalling (on this Frost is not Wordsworth) but an insight or sense of a connection between things which has a familiarity and  feels like  a remembrance. (The way in which metaphor is at the root of poetry and, perhaps, all knowledge is a point Frost developed in ‘Education by Poetry’ (1931)). The substance of this initial insight is what constitutes at least the beginnings of the “context-meaning-subject matter” so essential to any successful poem. All poets will recognise such a moment as Frost describes: “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.” But from such momentary delight and recognition (which will be accompanied by powerful emotions, even tears), Frost makes it clear the process,  the figure , of the poem’s making, still lies ahead and is one of surprise and discovery.

22. Paragraphs 4–6 … As the poem struggles to exist, the poet must remain alert and watchful to what may help build it as “it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events”. It is a fundamentally metaphorical process of making connections, often quite unforeseen ones: “The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time”. In a striking image, Frost suggests we are like giants, drawing on elements of previous experience and hurling them ahead of us as a way of paving a pathway into our own future. We make sense of what we encounter by reference to what we have experienced in the past. It’s in this way that a poem is able to result in “a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as (religious) sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” Our pathway ahead is illuminated, even if only briefly, by the ordering and landscaping the poem creates towards future experience by reference to what we already know.

23. Paragraphs 4–6 … This is why Frost teasingly argues the logic of a good poem is “backward, in retrospect”. What it must not be (and he has his earlier abstractionist targets in mind again) is pre-conceived or imposed before the fact (even if what we pre-impose is the illogical kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another). Such willed pre-conception can never yield anything other than a “trick poem”. It is not a prophecy, but rather something “felt”, a feeling figure, an emotional response involving both past and future and it must be “a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.”

24. Paragraphs 4–6 … The crucial role of emotion is perhaps easily missed. And to allow the role of the passions, Frost insists on the greatest freedom of the poetic materials to move about, to be moved about, to establish relations regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affective affinity. This is Frost’s answer to one of the writer’s constant quandaries: how true to the original experience must I be? For Frost, truth to the emotional response at the inception of the poem (not necessarily the original incident’s emotional charge) is key and that demands artistic independence and freedom. Some distance is required.

25. Paragraph 7 The essay comes to concentrate finally on the necessary freedoms of the poet. The artist’s freedom is the freedom to raid his own experiences: “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.” It’s in this freedom that Frost contrasts scholars/academics and artists. Scholars work from knowledge. But so do artists – this is the point of the early paragraphs of the essay. But the two groups come by their knowledge in quite different ways. Scholars get theirs via conscientious and thorough-going linearity of purpose. Poets, on the other hand, acquire their cavalierly and just as it happens, whether in or out of books. Poets ought to “stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields”. Poets do not learn by assignment, Frost says, not even by self-assignment.

26. Paragraph 7… In the course of the figure a new poem may be making, the poet must assert his liberty to work in a dramatically metaphorical way, to be possessed of both “originality” and “initiative” in order to be able to snatch “a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic”. Frost concludes with another vivid image of the poem making its figure in the course of composition. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” The aptness of the image lies partly in the ice’s gradual vanishing (what a poem can offer is only ever “momentary”) and the frictionless quality reflects Frost’s insistence that a poem cannot be “worried into being” through pre-conceived effortfulness . The ice’s movement is generated and facilitated by its own process of melting and the poem too must propel itself (not be propelled by the artist). The resulting figure follows an unpredictable and fresh course, the links it draws from both past and present towards the future offering temporary clarifications of all three for the poet and (something Frost does not explore here) perhaps finally broadcast, available and effective for its readers too.

27. Summary 2 Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” talks about his own perception of how a poem should be and how people should view a poem. He mentions that all poems should be distinct from one another and should have wisdom that the readers can benefit from, not only to entertain them. The poem should also evoke its readers to discover something they previously do not know, but they actually know from the start. Frost also noted the relationship between the writer’s emotions while writing the poem and the reader’s emotion while reading the poem. At the end of his essay, Frost asserted that poems are eternal—that they will forever bear their wisdom and truth.

28. Analysis The author’s main argument in this essay is that each poem should be unique enough to be distinguished from one another and that they should not only be made in order to entertain the readers but to give them wisdom—that poems should “begin in delight and end in wisdom” (Frost, par. 4). The author also argued that sounds are not just the only basis that makes a poem “sound”—that  is, according to the rules of logic. However, Frost also made clear the distinction of the logic of scholars and artists—with the artist’s (such as poets) logic is backward (par. 6), thus utterly suggesting that scholars and other masters of philosophy have totally different views of life, much less than art and poetry as he noted that “Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ” (par. 7).

29. Analysis… He also added that “scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs [knowledge] cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books,” which suggests that poetry cannot be measured by logic or evaluated through the means of scholars. Perhaps, the author is suggesting that poems are best evaluated through emotion. This assertion can be seen with the author’s words when he stated “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (par. 5). This line also suggests the link between the poet’s feelings when he writes the poem and the feelings that the readers get when they read the poem—this is one of the greatest achievement that a poet can have, to be able to convey his feelings through his writings.

30. Many people, though, might question Frost’s authority for his assertion. Note that this essay was written in 1939. By that time, Robert Frost has achieved the status as a known and much-acclaimed poet of his era. His being this well-known and well-respected poet of this time gave him the needed authority to talk about the figures that poems make or how poems should be treated and taken by people. Most of the things that he argued in his essays are the things that he had already achieved by then especially the being the poem’s originality and flow “from delight to wisdom” as observed from his poems such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” and “Fire and Ice” among others.

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