Robert Frost: Likeness
Robert Frost was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Directive (1947)
Context: I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: 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.
Originally delivered at a poetry reading at Princeton University (26 October 1937), published in Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (1995)
General sources
Context: When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don’t feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing. … You must have form — performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism — for the New Republic.
Directive (1947)
Context: Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it…
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: 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.
“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (17 May 1935)
1930s
Variant: Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
"Birches" (1920)
General sources
Source: Swinger of Birches
Context: I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: 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.
1910s, Home Burial (1914)
" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
1930s
"London Observer (29 March 1959)
1950s
" The Runaway http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/runaway-the/" (1923)
1920s
" The Need of Being Versed in Country Things http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/need-of-being-versed-in-country-things-the/"
1920s
Source: 1930s, The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)