Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frostwas an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century, Frost was honored frequently...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 March 1874
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing ... is discovering.
Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.
Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.
I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.
Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.
All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.
Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.
Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.
I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.
How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?