Most people know Robert Frost was a great poet, but few know how incredible his writings about poetry were. Many of his statements have the quality of aphorisms. Listen in:
“A poet must always prefer to do something well to doing people good.”
“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…”
“[Poetry] is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.”
“The only discipline to begin with is the inner mood…[The poet] must be entranced to the exact premonition.”
“Our object is to say something that is something.”
“The great pleasure in writing poetry is in having been carried off. It is as if you stood astride of the subject that lay on the ground, and they cut the cord, and the subject gets up under you and you ride it. You adjust yourself to the motion of the thing itself. That is the poem.”
“There is nothing more composing than composition.”
“…a small poem is like the five or six balls a pitcher pitches to a given batter. There is a little system–a little set of pitched balls; a little set of sentences. You make the little set and the coming off is it–long or short.”
I always liked this line: “…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.”
his writing on poetry along with ts eliot’s writing on poetry are perfect. that is all.