Lecture

By: Robert Frost

Date: 1915

Source: Frost, Robert. "The Imagining Ear." Collected Poems, Prose & Poetry. New York: Library of America, 1995.

About the Author: Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco, California. His father, William Prescott Frost, was a New Englander, and his mother, Isabel Moodie Frost, was Scottish. William, a journalist and local politician, died when Frost was 11, and the family returned to the East coast to live with family members. Though not an ambitious student, young Robert found that he loved literature during high school. He eventually attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not earn a degree from either school. Frost supported himself by teaching, farming, and working in a textile mill before he began publishing poetry. In 1895, he married Elinor White. His first poem had been published in 1894 and he continued to try to write poetry. In 1912, the Frosts went to live in England, where they remained for three years. During this time, Robert Frost published his first book of poetry, A Boy's Will (1914). His second book, North of Boston, was published the following year and is generally considered his best work. These volumes established Frost as a poet. Throughout his career, he received many awards, including four Pulitzer Prizes and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He served as a poet in residence at several universities and published many more volumes of poetry. Frost died in 1963.

Robert Frost delivered a lecture to the Browne and Nichols School on May 10, 1915. In the lecture he differentiated between sound and visual cues of the poet. Visual cues (colors, sights, and so on) are often discussed, but according to Frost the "imaginary ear" is just as important. He describes the difficulty of capturing tones, or real speech, on paper. Frost objects to "mechanical repetition" or repeating sounds just for the sake of repetition. Frost encourages his audience to "Get the stuff of life into the technique of your writing." He uses two of his well-known poems, "The Pasture" and "Mending Wall" to make his points.

Frost relied on the Romantic traditions for his poetry. Victorian poetry had moved away from the Romantic tradition, using flowery and highly rhetorical speech and language instead of language of everyday. Frost liked to think that he was original in his use of sound. But he wasn't. Poets had worked on capturing the sounds of spoken language for centuries. What Frost did was capture the language of the New England region.

Frost's poetry is sometimes seen as deceptively simple. It is easy to read and, therefore, people think it is easy to understand. He did not receive as much attention as his contemporaries because of the seemingly simple style but he never betrayed his style to try to imitate others. Frost often adds an ironic twist in his poetry. For example, in "Mending Wall" he uses the lines "Good fences make good neighbors" twice to make a point about the neighbor's attitude. He relied on techniques, on discovering the sounds and the meters that would get his message across and left the interpretation to the reader. His emphasis on the pastoral, or rural, setting may have added to the thought that he was easy to understand. In both "The Pasture" and "Mending Wall," the topics are familiar: Going to clean the spring and fetch a calf in the first poem and fixing the traditional New England stone wall in the second.

By emphasizing sound and speech, Frost was returning to the Romantic tradition in poetry. William Wordsworth believed that poets were "men speaking to men." Frost relied on the speech of those around him, the New England farmer, and his neighbors in New Hampshire, to provide him with idiomatic and dialectic speech for his poetry.

Frost's poetry differed from his contemporaries who were experimenting with free verse, Imagism, and Vortexism. His poetry seemed more traditional. In fact, he was experimenting not only with sound but also with meter and blank verse. Frost's poems did confront the modernist feeling of alienation.

Frost's essay is important because it shows his awareness of his craft. He realized what he was doing in the poetry and how he was crafting lines and selecting words to influence the reader's interpretation. Beyond that, the poems that he chose as illustrations are ones that have gained prominence in the Frost canon. Both poems were published in North of Boston. "The Pasture" was used as a preface in that volume and in other later volumes. "Mending Wall" was the first poem in the collection. "The Pasture" has one speaker. It was originally written as an apology to his wife Elinor, attempting to demonstrate his devotion to her. The speaker would not Page 31  |  Top of Article spend long on the mundane things. The poem is in the pastoral tradition. Nature plays a central role in the poem, with the water, the leaves, and the calf each playing a part. In his lecture, Frost emphasizes capturing the thing you are writing about. He does this here in simple description and an invitation for a companion to experience the natural world by his side.

"Mending Wall" is mentioned as the second example but the text is not included. It is worth some examination to show how Frost's ideas are also depicted in this poem. Again, Frost captures the language of the people. The narrator and his neighbor set out to fix the wall one more year. In a dramatic monologue the narrator challenges his neighbor's ideas about fences with questions about their use. In this poem Frost uses repetition twice. The line "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and "Good fences make good neighbors" are both repeated. There are good reasons for this. The fence or wall works as a metaphor to explore boundaries, individualism, and neighborliness. There are questions about tradition woven into the poem. Fences are mended each year because they always have been, but do they need to be? The fence not only separates crops, but it also separates people. The poem is sometimes interpreted as pitting pragmatic reasons for walls or boundaries against limitless imagination. Others interpret the speaker as not taking sides and leaving it to the reader. No matter the interpretation of either poem, both demonstrate Frost's craft and his philosophy of composing poetry.

Mr. Browne has alluded to the seeing eye. I want to call your attention to the function of the imagining ear. Your attention is too often called to the poet with extrordinarily vivid sight, and with the faculty of choosing exceptionally telling words for the sight. But equally valuable, even for school-boy themes, is the use of the ear for material for compositions. When you listen to a speaker, you hear words, to be sure,—but you also hear tones. The problem is to note them, to imagine them again, and to get them down in writing. But few of you probably ever thought of the possibility or of the necessity of doing this. You are generally told to distinguish simple, compound, and complex sentences,—long and short,—
Though extraordinarily popular with the American public, Robert Frost's poems have been generally overlooked for their technical achievements. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. periodic and loose,—to varying sentence structure, etc. "Not all sentences are short, like those of Emerson, the writer of the best American prose. You must vary your sentences, like Stevenson, etc." All this is missing the vital element. I always had a dream of getting away from it, when I was teaching school,—and, in my own writing and teaching, of bringing in the living sounds of speech. For it is a fundamental fact that certain forms depend on the sound;—e.g., note the various tones of irony, acquiescence, doubt, etc. in the farmer's "I guess so." And the great problem is, can you get these tones down on paper? How do you tell the tone? By the context, by the animating spirit of the living voice. And how many tones do you think there are flying around? Hundreds of them—hundreds never brought to book. Compare T. E. Brown's To a Blackbird: "O blackbird, what a boy you are" Compare W. B. Yeats's "Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream"

I went to church, once (loud laughter)—this will sound funnier when I tell you that the only thing I remember is the long line of "Nows" that I counted. The repetition grew tiresome. I knew just when to expect a 'Now', and I knew beforehand just what the Page 32  |  Top of Article tone was going to be. There is no objection to repetition of the right kind,—only to the mechanical repetition of the tone. It is all right to repeat, if there is something for the voice to do. The vital thing, then, to consider in all composition, in prose or verse, is the ACTION of the voice,—sound-posturing, gesture. Get the stuff of life into the technique of your writing. That's the only escape from dry rhetoric.

When I began to teach, and long after I began to write, I didn't know what the matter was with me and my writing and with other people's writing. I recall distinctly the joy with which I had the first satisfaction of getting an expression adequate for my thought. I was so delighted that I had to cry. It was the second stanza of the little poem on the Butterfly, written in my eighteenth year. And the Sound in the mouths of men I found to be the basis of all effective expression,—not merely words or phrases, but sentences,—living things flying round,—the vital parts of speech. And my poems are to be read in the appreciative tones of this live speech. For example, there are five tones in this first stanza,

"The Pasture"

Similar, free, persuasive, assuring, and inviting tones in second stanza)