Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 “Stay Unassuming”
- 2 Frost Biography and A Witness Tree
- 3 Frost and the Questions of Pastoral
- 4 Frost and the Ancient Muses
- 5 Frost as a New England Poet
- 6 “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”
- 7 Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor
- 8 Frost and the Meditative Lyric
- 9 Frost’s Poetics of Control
- 10 Frost’s Politics and the Cold War
- 11 “Synonymous with Kept”
- 12 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe
- Select bibliography
- Index
7 - Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 “Stay Unassuming”
- 2 Frost Biography and A Witness Tree
- 3 Frost and the Questions of Pastoral
- 4 Frost and the Ancient Muses
- 5 Frost as a New England Poet
- 6 “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”
- 7 Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor
- 8 Frost and the Meditative Lyric
- 9 Frost’s Poetics of Control
- 10 Frost’s Politics and the Cold War
- 11 “Synonymous with Kept”
- 12 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Metaphor is the whole of poetry.” “Poetry is simply made of metaphor . . . Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing.” (CPPP, 786) Such are the burdens Robert Frost placed upon metaphor, and on himself as a poet. He went even farther in his claiming that metaphor is the whole of thinking, and that, therefore, to be educated by poetry - note: by poetry - is to be taught to think (CPPP, 786). In “Education by Poetry,” an essay that originated in a talk at Amherst, he says:
[T]he teacher must teach the pupil to think . . . We still ask boys in college to think, . . . but we seldom tell them it is just putting this and that together, it is saying one thing in terms of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which reaches to the sky . . . The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetry - that is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go, but it is the mind's furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up.
(CPPP, 723; 725)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost , pp. 155 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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