http://www.robertfrost.org/

Notes from Conversations
Drawing upon letters written while summering with Robert Frost in 
the New Hampshire summers of 1915 and 1916, at the request 
of the editor of The Inlander, an undergraduate publication at the 
University of Michigan, Professor Morris P. Tilley prepared the following
 article for the magazine's February 1918 issue. 

Robert Frost is a real poet. He has had the determination
 to struggle for twenty years towards that end. 

"It was instinct that kept me going in the direction I took, all the time. 
A sort of feeling told me that I was doing the right thing.
 I cannot explain it. I had made up my mind not to have my poetry 
recognized. So, of course, the day my poetry was accepted in England
 was one of the happiest days in my life." 

Frost is a delightful personality, frank, straightforward, and honest. 
I have been charmed with his candor.
He is without pretense of any kind. His personal view of everything 
is most pronounced. "I am very personal," he said to me once; 
and it is true. There is no restraint about him at all. He is rather
 like nature in his abundant outgiving, which is no effort to him, 
but obviously a joy. 

His strength is easily felt. As one of his critics has said of him, 
he is a "robust philosopher." 

"I do not like S ," he said, referring to an acquaintance we avoided 
in common, "because he  sees but one side, the bad side.
 I do not object to expressing an unfavorable opinion, and to the point, 
when there is need for it, but I insist that we see the other side also."[...] 

I turned the conversation to his poetry and said that I should like 
to see him try his hand at drama.  He finds himself interested
 in drama but not in the conventional kind of poetic drama that holds the 
stage today. Speaking of effective dramatic composition, 
I referred to Pope's statement that in one of the weakest 
of Shakespeare's plays, Love's Labour's Lost, the speeches
 are so characteristic that if the names of the speakers had 
not been left us, we should still be able to assign each line to 
the proper character. This interested Frost and he dwelt on it. 

"I have three characters speaking in one poem, and I was not 
satisfied with what they said until I got them to speak so
 true to their characters that no mistake could be made as 
to who was speaking. I would never put the names 
of the speakers in front of what they said. They would have to tell that! 
by the truth to their character of what they said. It would be interesting 
to try to write a play with ten characters and not have any names before what they said." 

Teaching English was a favorite theme of conversation with Frost.
 He had taught this subject at Pinkerton Academy. 

"I did not have a textbook in my English teaching. Sometimes I was 
in good condition, and at others I could not do a thing.
I never kept on reading a book that made the class listless.
 If I saw the class uninterested I always closed the book and
 passed the rest of the hour some other way. I learned to watch
 for the 'fidgets' on the part of the students, and when I saw them in
 evidence I recognized them as a danger signal. They were given the
 children to protect themselves with.  I was taken from teaching English 
and transferred to the State Normal School to teach psychology." 

Both at Dartmouth and at Harvard Frost was a student for a short while. 
The regular routine of college life was irksome to him,
so that he did not stay at either place[...] 

"I could not then live in a college or university atmosphere, because
 of the restraint. I could not do things because they had to be done. 
I suppose I have been guided in my life so far by instinct to protect 
what I was or wanted to be. The most pronounced instance where
 my life was influenced by this instinct was when I gave up my work at Harvard.
 I lost friends by leaving Harvard. I did not regret leaving, however,
 for I could not stay. I could not have explained then even 
to myself why I did not stay. I just had to go." 

In his poetry Frost avoids poetic diction. He uses only words of his own, 
always striving to be natural and sincere. His blank verse is 
nearly the normal blank verse, with only a few changes of his own. 
He has not been devoted  at any younger period to the influence of
 any great writer. He believes that conversation with friends has given him 
the moments of highest joy, greater than that of books. The words "close" 
and "near" were of much meaning to him in the days of his formative period.
 He felt that he wanted to get the qualities of intimate conversation into his poetry. 

Next to this influence, Wordsworth (who to him is a very great poet), Turgenev,
 in his Sportsman's Sketches, and the Odyssey have influenced him most.
He has much pleasure in Milton, too. His 'Lycidas' he greatly admires. 
He endeavors to be simple and straightforward in his work, to strip 
a theme bare of all but the essentials.  He is going to talk in 
St. Johnsbury soon on 'Sound in Poetry,' about which he has interesting theories. 
He thinks that the creative power of the voice is all important in poetry. 
Theoecritus, to whose writings critics say that he is indebted for some 
of his ideas of style, he has not read. 

In his earlier student days he worked much in the classics. Speaking of the Odyssey he 
applauded the strength and restraint that he finds in the poem. He dwelt on the 
value of restraint n poetry and how one had to avoid doing in poetry many unwise things. 

"All must be rigorously rejected that is not perfectly true and sincere. 
In the Odyssey the swim of Ulysses from the raft has powerfully possessed 
my imagination. It is one of the things that has  gripped me. I spent three 
years studying Greek and six or seven years studying Latin." (Significant testimony, 
in view of the unpopularity of the classics and the growing popularity of 
vocational studies, which he deplores.) 

Today Frost spoke about the trials of a poet in arriving at the goal where 
he wins some success. 

"I never took the foolish attitude that-I was not judged rightly and that
 the people didn't know what they were talking about.  That is a mistake.
 It might be the poetry was not good enough, in which case all I had to do was make it better.
 It might be that it was not to the personal taste of the reader, in which case 
I had only to go on writing to my own taste. There is no other way to attain 
to poetic success than by stern emotional control and absolute adherence to sincere endeavor.
Slopping over isn't poetry." 

Speaking of his theory of poetry host laid especial stress upon the
 importance of conversational tones in poetry. 

"There is the visual appeal of poetry. We all recognize so-called poetic words 
that visualize pictures for us. As this is the appeal to the eye, so there 
is a more important appeal to the ear. The music of poetry is not like 
the music of an instrument, however. It is something different. Music in poetry 
is obtained by catching the conversational tones which are the special
 property of vital utterances. There is the sense the words convey, 
and there is also an emotional quality, an interpretative quality,
 in the tone in which the words are uttered. 
To gather these, because they are significant and vital and 
carry through the ear an appeal of sincerity, 
is a main effort in poetry.[...] Conversational tones are numerous in dramatic poetry. 
As a result, the dramatic is the most intense of all kinds of poetry.
 It is the most surcharged with significance." 

Frost cannot write unless he can hear in him the voices carrying on the conversation that he records. 
These visitations of style, as Stevenson calls them, are not at his command. 
His poem "The Death of the Hired Man"  he wrote ten years ago in two hours,
 without changing a word, at a time when his nature was in equipoise.
 At other times he can't write at all. He has to wait until he has the inspiration very clearly,
 although he does not employ the word "inspiration" when speaking of his poetic mood. 

In talking about poetry he does not employ the conventional words that one usually
 hears in such discussions. He objects to the expression "creative imagination." 

"One critic says that I make my imagination too concrete. As if imagination 
could be made too concrete! Poetic diction is all wrong. Words must be
 the ordinary words that we hear about us, to which the imagination must give 
an iridescence. Then only are words really poetic." 

"Words that are the product of another poet's imagination cannot he passed off again. 
They have done their work.  One of my abominations is the word 'immemorial,
' which every poet for years has pulled in whenever he has
 had need of a long word. They can't get away with it.
 One poet made an effort to use in his poetry 
 Shakespeare's word 'incarnadine.' And again no one has been able, 
although many have tried,  to employ with success Keats' 'alien' in the beautiful line,
'She stood in tears amid the alien corn.  All this using of poetic diction is wrong.
 I use only the words I find in conversation, making them
 poetic as best I can with what power I command. 

"Swinburne's line is the humming kind of meter. Swinburne writes
 conventional poetry without real feeling. He piles on the epithets that 
appeal to the eye. But there is something more in good poetry. That is the
 appeal to the ear.  This he did not make. As the picture is drawn for the eye, 
so the conversational tones of the words have 
a special message to the ear. Everything worth saying has
 its own particular way, its own inevitable way, of being said. 

"There is a tone of surprise or of embarrassment or of wisdom
 or of horror or of hope. My effort is to catch 
the high emotions of the race that have these marks 
on them for the ear. There are hundreds of these 
expressions that when we hear them we recognize. 
It is the character that the voice lends to the meaning
that tells the whole tale to the ear of the listener. 
The poetry that has this quality is what I should like to write." 

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