This excerpt is from Mr. Frost’s January 19, 1960, talk and reading before a Dartmouth College audience.
SOMETIMES I WONDER if I wouldn’t talk a little about just what a poem is for me, what I think I’m doing when I write a poem. “What do you think you’re doing?” we say, you know. I never really dealt with that. […]
But it is sort of an interesting question. What do you think you’re doing in television when they tell you to come walking down a lane talking to yourself? Don’t they know that the soliloquy’s gone out of fashion?
They don’t seem to. They had me at a graveyard the other day, a famous graveyard, at Newport, Rhode Island, and asked me to walk around talking to myself about the stones. […]
But what does one think he’s doing? They might say: “You write a poem when you’re alone, don’t you? Are you soliloquizing then?”
Well, that’s a hard one. You’re talking to someone. And it’s a long-developed convention that you sit there by yourself. You can’t do it with anybody in the room.
And I can’t do it aloud. If I did it aloud it would spoil it. It’s as I hear it in my mind’s ear that it’s at its best. I can’t quite say out loud to you here the way I hear the poem in my mind’s ear.
I’ve heard actors and actresses—a few, a very few—who got such an exquisite reproduction of the tone of voice meant in a sentence of writing that I worshipped ’em. That’s something that’s followed me all my life. I’ve gone to hear the great ones—to see that their difference is just that, something exquisitely close to the truth of the tone that’s intended. And there is something there that is to be caught, you know. You don’t just make it any way you please.
When Horatio says—(Someone asks him if he believes in all this superstition about what the rooster does at certain hours of the night.)—he just says, “So I have heard, and do in part believe….”37 Oh, isn’t that a great sentence, in my sense of the word? […] A very gentleman’s answer to all these things. It’s the answer that I bring into mind whenever there’s something I don’t quite get, you know, about things.
I met somebody the other day that I talked with witches about. He was ten years in a concentration camp. But he came originally from Poland, where he said it was quite the familiar thing to have witch women around.
We have transmediums, and I find so very few people ever saw one. I’ve seen ’em—never consulted ’em; but I know what’s going on there, somewhat.
And when they say, “There is something extrasensory; there are things beyond.” I say, “So I have heard, and do in part believe….” (I don’t say I don’t know what part.)
And there’s a nice distinction there. That’s not liberality; that’s sheer worldliness, you see. I’m that worldly. That’s what Horatio was, just worldly. He wasn’t a liberal, just worldly. He’d risk your thinking that, if you’d risk his thinking something else. Just we won’t make a to-do about anything. […]
I’d often think a poem might have this for its little preface. It might be, “How would it be to put it this way?” You see? “How would it be to put it this way?” whatever it’s going to be. And then the end would be, “Do you get it?” That’s in it all the time. But you don’t ever say ’em.
You say something sort of wicked and a little perverse and as much as you can do, you know—as you can get away with. See? The poem is getting away with something. You’re getting away with something.
And your humor and your mood. Sometimes it goes very deep and dark. And it goes very cheerful. And it goes oftentimes very wicked, teasing and wicked. That’s in it.
Now, this controversy that’s going on—(I don’t read literary magazines, and I don’t read reviews. But they come to me on the air. People tell me things.)—I know there’s something going on there, about obscurity and making difficulty.
And I know some of my friends, I just wish they wouldn’t throw themselves away, so fashion—just be obscure and think they’ve done something because nobody knows what they’re talking about. They invoke the past, somebody that didn’t get read very much in his lifetime. But that isn’t the point at all. That’s some accidence of neglect.
You take Emily Dickinson. Lots of the little poems, if they’d got out, they would have got round. They didn’t happen to get out. She courted interest. She courted it. She wrote to the right people sometimes. But they didn’t get waked up to an interest in her. She’d say a tragic thing like this:
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of the Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.38
That kicked around a long time—very deadly sentiment; deep, dark one. […]
And we aren’t writing poetry to forget darkness. It’s a blended thing. It isn’t all Christmas cards and birthday cards. It’s something deep, deep and dark oftentimes.
And you ask people to “come on in.” It’s like that when you write a poem. Come on in; share my mood; take it with me. And sometimes it’s one way and sometimes it’s another.
That’s the first thing to say. And, then, every poem, for me, is a little feat of association, putting a couple of things together, as you do in a quip or a witticism or a thing. A poem has got that. That’s the core of the poem.
You see, the point of her poem—that one that I said—it hits its high place when she calls it “The will of the Inquisitor.” You see what she’s after and who she’s calling “the Inquisitor.” If you aren’t in on it, you’re out. That’s all.
And it’s a partly, a percentage thing. Some people get you in one mood, and some will get you in another. Some don’t go with you in that sentiment. And if it gets shallow and political and you talk partisan, about forty-eight percent will be on your side and the other fifty-two against you—or vice-versa, as you’re a Democrat or a Republican.
We aren’t playing at that level—exactly. Once in a while, sometimes you get a little political. And you can tell with your audience that you’re getting on dangerous ground that way.
Now, all thought—all thought—in philosophy, in science, in poetry is a feat of association. Just put it this way: being reminded by the sight of this that’s happening, that’s in front of you, by something you’d almost thought you’d forgotten—in a book or in life or somewhere—bringing things together.
And all the great achievements in science are just feats of association. Now, the little poem may be a very slight one, a little feat of association—just the same as a joke may be a very slight one; may be a rather deep one or it may be a very slight one.
Some saying, some country saying, often looks more or less humorous. And when you think of it, it’s very, very deep; comes out of great depths of association, putting this and that together—as we say, “two and two together.” […]
One of my favorite occupations for years—one of my favorite pleasures and times of sense of success—is when I made a good couplet in a poem, within the poem, or out all by itself. I have a few around. You may have seen them, and you may not. […]
The couplet—the rhyming, the putting things together by rhyme—I heard described as the degeneracy of poetry that came in after Latin went out. (I read that in a book not terribly long ago.) And, you know, it’s just to misunderstand the rhyme. The rhyme is an outward symbol of this inner coupling that I’m talking about—putting this and that together—this feat of coupling. It’s an outer symbol of it. (Talking symbol in these days.)
It has that same sort of thing, bringing this and that together—more on the surface, more in the form of the thing than in the soul of the thing, the spirit of the thing. That’s my “How would it be to put it that way?” You see, “Do you get it?” […]
You’ll notice, as you come through a poem, where I’m having a very good time. You can tell I’m having a very good time, because—more than usual, that is—what you like to call the “inspiration” is good. You feel you’re up; that I’m having some good couplets.
Sometimes they’re separated by others, you know. There’ll be four: A rhyming with C, and B rhyming with D; that kind of thing. But it’s still something of the way they clink—clink, you know—the way, click and come.
That’s what I think I’m doing. I’m only telling you what I think I’m doing.
These fellows, I just wonder about ’em. Some of them friends of mine, but I wonder how they have the courage just to write on the principle, I think—(I’m only guessing at their principle.)—that an arrangement is all there is to it. So, why not arrange nothing? It’s just as interesting to arrange nothing as it is something. And that’s what’s the matter. They’re arranging nothing.
They’ve got some idea, I’m afraid, that to use a word that surprises you by coming in at all, because it doesn’t belong in, that’s a feat. I don’t know what they are up to unless that. […]
About nothing? No, it’s going to be about something with me. One of my great friends, a poet—(Gone to his reward; whatever that is.) he said to me one night when he had been drinking a little too much, he said, “The trouble with you is you write on subjects.” And I said to him, “The trouble with you is—” (I imitated his manner.) I said, “The trouble with you is you write on bric-a-brac.”
I didn’t think he took that in. He was in this state of mind. But the next book he sent me, he’d written in it s-m-o-r-e; s’more—“s’more bric-a-brac.”
And we were at variance a little, as friends. As a matter of fact, we should have known each other earlier than we did. We were a little off, just because of the difference. It kept us away from each other.
That’s a curious thing, how protective that is. I don’t live in the crowd so I live with people of whom they say, “He’s a fine fellow, but he can’t write.” I never stay with people I feel that way. I don’t have to, because I live in the country. But some of ’em live with each other and say that magnanimous thing all the time about each other: “He’s a great fellow, but I can’t read him.” That’s supposed to be the big style.
I don’t like to be thrown with anybody who, primarily, I don’t like for his work. That’s a dear thing to him, and why should I pretend to like him, when I think he’s a rotten writer?
And I have strained a point now and then—to go to these difficult people—I’ve strained a point, when I’m thrown with ’em by accident, to try to like the awful stuff. And I’ve been a little insincere, a little false about it.
And when they got mad at me for some reason—my religion or my politics or something—I was greatly relieved, because I didn’t have to pretend to like their poetry anymore.
I’m not honest, but I wish I were. You see, I aspire to be honest. […]
I’m going to have to award a thousand dollars to a western poet tomorrow night or the night after—day after tomorrow—at the Poetry Society of America, won by a fellow who lives in Denver.
I know who he is. I just found that out. I never saw the poem. I don’t know what the poem’s like. But it’s a narrative poem. The prize is a thousand dollars for an American narrative poem.
I asked somebody who’d seen it, “Is it in free verse?” And he said, “I’m afraid it is.” You see, he knows that bothers me a little. But it doesn’t too much, again. I’d rather it’d be in some sort of measure, beat. I want to start the metronome when it goes.
Now, I haven’t been talking footnotes at all or defending myself at all. That isn’t a defense. I could be entirely wrong.
I was just telling you, when people might ask me from the audience—(Many times I bet they’ve wanted to ask me.)—“What do you think you’re doing, when you write a poem? What do you think you’re doing?”——
I’ve had a newspaperman say to me, “Why do you write verse at all, when there’s honest prose to write?”
Why do you? Why do you sing at all? Why do you dance? Why do you beat time? Why do you drum? And so on.
It’s an old convention. I don’t suppose I would have written poems at all if somebody else hadn’t written some. I wouldn’t have started a thing like that, not if you come right down to it.
—at the University of Delaware, May 16,1959:
WHEN I’m reading longer poems, some of the long poems, if you were very discerning and if you were very penetrating, you could see that I take almost too much pleasure where I’m having great luck with the couplets.
They can get very mechanical, of course, and so much a matter of mere virtuosity that you wonder how great a poet Pope was. And there’s always that danger of poetry, of getting to be a virtuoso, anyway; that is, a person who can do it all on his know-how, without having any spirit in it. […]
But, you see, there’s something more, isn’t there? The poem has got to have that, the feat of association. And then it’s got to have the couplets, the forms of doubleness. And then it’s got to be flushed with something. And I know very well that I hide that from myself sometimes some: that it must be flushed, like color to the cheek, something of human feeling, something of sympathy, something that’s near—that I don’t like to talk about technically; it isn’t a technical thing. […]
This doubleness goes on all the time, more or less. People conscious of it often speak of it. With me—a good deal of it, the ulteriority—I used to say I had an “ulteriority complex” that I always was—(Always, sure; I agreed.)—I was always thinking of more than I was saying. But if I’d wanted to say it, I’d have said it out. You see, I want to keep something back.