In May of 1952 Mr. Frost traveled to Billings, Montana, to be the speaker at the high-school graduation of his granddaughter Robin Fraser. While at Billings he also spoke at both Rocky Mountain College and the Eastern Montana College of Education. His May-eighteenth talk at the latter institution is represented by this excerpt, within which passing reference is made to U. S. Senator Estes Kefauver, who was then heading a highly publicized investigation of organized crime.
I WOULDN’T GO round the country advocating poetry or defending poetry or trying to make poetry out as of special value in education, I suppose. But I must think that it comes in somewhere, or I wouldn’t be standing here, would I?
I think some of my friends in the educational world think that it is decorative, that it belongs to education as cloves belong to a ham. You stick the poetry into the ham, the solid education. And of course that isn’t right. That wouldn’t be the way to think of it at all.
It belongs to the very essence of it all, just as much as anything you can name, in its small way. It may not be in time; it may not take too much time in school. And I don’t know how directly it ought to be taught. But from childhood up, it probably has its greatest value in preparing everybody in figures of speech, in metaphor.
And when you stop to think of it, all our wisdom, everything we know, is in figures of speech. When you look at the way people can go wrong about politics, religion, philosophy, it’s from some misunderstanding of metaphor. Nearly everything that we say has a metaphorical basis.
For instance, I hear somebody say that “I’m a mechanist; that is, I believe the universe is a machine.” He says he’s a mechanist.
I’m finishing that for him. He leaves it that way: “I believe the world is a machine.” And then I want to say to him: “That’s a pretty good figure. What you’re saying is, ‘The world, the universe is like unto a machine.’” You see, “like unto.”
And then I say: “If you’re used to figures of speech, you must know that every figure of speech breaks down. You can only go a little way with it. It has a little significance and, then, it’s gone; you have to have another figure of speech.”
I say to him: “Now look, it’s ‘like unto a machine,’ you say. Exactly ‘like unto a machine’?” And I say: “All right, now, did you ever see a machine without a pedal for the foot, a button for the finger, or a lever for the hand? All those three things belong to a machine—all of them or one of them: pedal for the foot, button for the finger, a lever for the hand.”
He says, “Yes.”
“In the universe do you know where those are?”
“Well, then, I mean”—he says—“I mean it’s like unto a machine, only it isn’t like unto a machine.”
He stayed too long with it.
From childhood up, there’s always the intimation of something like that. And in the good poetry, beginning with Mother Goose, half the time you’re asked to be on the lookout for some metaphor, some intimation of something else. It’s as if you’re saying, “Now I’m saying one thing, but while I’m saying that, I may be saying something more.”
The double meaning. For instance, it says in Mother Goose, doesn’t it?:
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?…
This is a famous poem, which I was brought up on.—
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?…
You see, it’s an English poem. You can tell, because it says “been” to rhyme with “queen.”—
…where have you been?
I’ve been to London to see the queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you see there?
I saw…
Now, watch me make something else of it.—
I saw nothing but what I would have seen
if I’d stayed at home.
I saw a little mouse run under a chair.
[…] Did that mean that to the child? No, but it got the child ready to play with that sort of thing, play with double meanings, ulteriorities.
Now, I’m inclined to think that half the trouble that they tell about in the world—I don’t believe that there are troubles any worse at any given time than ’tis at any other. If it is, I wouldn’t be able to know it; I’m not smart enough.
I deplore the corruption today and agree that it’s terrible, with Mr. Kefauver. But then I remember, as I look back—(I make a kind of figure.)—I say, “This time is like unto another time.” That’s what the history’s about, making figures of speech like that.
As for corruption, in Athens the greatest man of all—the greatest statesman of all, that made Athens, for the short time it was the greatest thing in the world’s history maybe, made it that—named Pericles; he was tried for corruption and convicted. So, we meet it elsewhere, you see, corruption. (As someone said, sadly, “Things were never the same in Athens after that.” Took the wind all out of it; Pericles lived afterward, but things weren’t the same.)
But if there is anything wrong with our time—(And we are troubled about the thing.)—you know, I think that very often that it’s nothing but an unpreparedness for the metaphors of Mr. Freud, for instance—as far as they go. Some metaphor about the child that has a little value in it, but you mustn’t stay with it too long.
There are figures of speech, metaphors, that have more lasting value than others. But all of them, you learn—as you read poetry—you learn to know that you must leave ’em; love ’em and leave ’em. They have their beauty. It’s insofar forth. That’s all.
I ought to say that I’ve taught everything but the kindergarten myself. And all the way along, that’s been a growing concern with me, about how we handle figures of speech, how to handle figures of speech. And that’s what poetry is all about.
Some poems are almost without that ulteriority. But almost always there’s a figure within the poem, scattered figures in details or a figure of the whole.
Now, of course, that’s almost the same as saying that everything is allegorical. And ’tis. You’ve got five or six different names just for the metaphor: “allegory,” “metaphor,” and so on. You can’t tell a story that anyone will listen to—no story has any valid interest—that hasn’t got something of intimation. “Intimation” is another word for it. “Hinting” is another word for it. And how far the hint goes and where the hint stops, that’s what we go into poetry to learn.
Now, that’s only one of the things. That’s the chief thing, though, in poetry—that to the mind, anyway; to the ear, something else. For instance, people are always looking for the soundness of poetry, whether it’s genuinely sound, valid. That’s all right, and that’s an important thing—lies in the metaphor. And then the other thing is whether it’s a sound, something to the ear.
I read poetry nowadays that seems to me not to have anything for my ear. It’s as if the fellow that wrote it had had his own ears cut off, and he’s content with the mental part of it, without the sound of it.
Now, I wanted chiefly to read to you tonight. That’s what you’re here to listen to. I’m not going to talk too long. Mind you, I haven’t made too much of it.
You know, what I’d like to say of poetry: that it’s some small part of that better half of the world that can’t be made a science of. And when I say “better half,” I say it partly as a good-humored jest—as we speak of our wives, you know, as our better halves. I just mean it’s—somehow—it’s a half.
And you might wonder about that, what I mean. But you can take whole poems. Take a poem of Shakespeare’s. And he lists in one poem I can think of—(It just like an itemized list of things that can’t be made a science of. Over and over again the metaphor is the thing.)—he says:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries…
You see, he’s talking right away in a metaphorical way about prayer there: “trouble deaf heaven…”—(He’s saying, for the moment he doesn’t believe in prayer.)—“And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.” You see, heaven’s deaf to me; he’s saying that for the minute. He doesn’t mean that’s an unbelief entirely, except as he’s speaking for him.—
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing myself like one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope…
Take that as my concern. There are three or four other concerns there before you get to that. But when you get there, that’s my concern as a writer: my scope and my art. I look on Whitman, for instance, and I can see that he decided to go in for scope, rather than art. And I look at another poet, like Landor, and I can see he decided to go in for art more than scope. But there it is, laid out for you in a grand figure, the pair of them there.—
With what I most enjoy contented least…
You see, that’s a figure of speech for the United States right now. All its writers are complaining—all but me. They’re all complaining, though we’ve got everything in the world and everybody thinks we have everything in the world. But everybody’s unhappy.—
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising…
Another grand figure for that thing in yourself that despises yourself.—
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising…
And then the whole thing a figure for what lifts you out of all this. He goes down, down, down, down, down, step by step—(That’s the figure.)—and then he says:
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth)…
See, this is all the sullenness of earth.—
And that’s a figure—he makes that the figure—of love, you see; step after step. It’s an itemized account, that is, of things that can’t be made a science of. There’s no science can touch any of that, never will.
We know how great science is; how remarkable ’tis; how wonderful, admirable, and all that, I’m saying. But there’s a whole half of life that I live and you live that can’t be touched with it.
And poetry always is insisting on that, in its figurative ways, always telling you what stays there: your concern that nobody can touch—psychology, psychiatry, and sociology; nothing that pretends to be science. “Haply I think on thee….” See? Who is she? No science about it.
I rode in a car the other night with a young fellow who insisted that the happiest thing you could do in teaching was to rationalize for students a poem like that—(He didn’t name that poem.) but to rationalize it and show how defective it is.
I said, “You’re one of these fellows that think you’re better than anything you know what’s the matter with.”
All that is a kind of wisdom that goes with delight, too. There’s a wisdom that’s uncritical, somewhat uncritical.
He said, “You’re irrational.” I said: “Well, first of all there’s delight, the delight of wisdom; and, then, the analysis of wisdom as you get older. But,” I said, “you’ll be too analytical by forty, anyway.”
Well, I leave that there and go to these things, some of them, that I’ll say to you. […]
This first one I’ll say to you is called “Birches.” And this is in blank verse. Art and scope; some art and some scope. That’s no boast. For years I didn’t know that was my concern, about my art and my scope.
Landor says in a poem, “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife….” Do you see what he was saying there? He was saying something that a whole administration of ours lived on. “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife….” That’s Wilson. He got that right out of that poem. President Wilson: “too proud to fight” he translated it into “too proud to fight.”—
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved…
And then this second line was what I wanted to get to:
You see, he said “nature” for “scope.” He thought he loved nature best, scope most. But he didn’t. We tell him somebody else did. […]
[Mr. Frost said his poem “Birches.”]
One of the commonest, one of the deadliest figures of speech going: that you have to leave somewhere. There is such a thing as “escape.” The other day a distinguished professor said to me, “Isn’t poetry, on the whole, to be considered just an escape?” I said, “No, I always thought it was a pursuit.”
That’s just spoiling his figure, that’s all. There is such a thing, but I said I didn’t want to hear this figure of speech “escape” anymore. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to. It’s all in criticism, all through everything, you know.”
Why did you write poetry? Why do you whistle? Why do you sing? Is it an escape? No, it’s a pursuit. I’m sure you’re after something nice—after something. Nothing’s after you but the devil!