Robert Frost
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
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 cannot we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in
thought. Then it will go hard if we cannot 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.
Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound
to being the better half of a poem. 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.
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 did not 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.
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 metal keeps its fragrance.
It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
