How Robert Frost Wrote His Poems
Observation and Internal Processing Resulted in Frost's Compositions
Jul 7, 2009
Robert Frost left behind many writings besides his poems. From his letters, his notebooks, and his lectures much can be learned about his poetic practice. How did he write a poem? What process did he go through?
Two Schools of Thought on Writing Poetry
In the 21st century, two divergent schools of though have arisen on how to write a poem. One school believes that revision is bad. A poem is primarily self-expression. Holding onto Wordsworth’s statement that a poem is the overflow of strong emotions (but misunderstanding the full context of Wordsworth’s concept), they believe revision is not needed. Whatever the emotions produce is what the poem should be. Revision would only destroy the strong emotions, and hence should be avoided.
Whether this school includes many published poets or only the amateurs is unknown, but it appears that some published poets are in this camp. The other school maintains that revision is a necessary part of producing a poem, just as it is in producing excellent prose. The first draft of something is just that—the first draft, with all the problems that writers such as Ernest Hemmingway ascribed to it. This school believes the revision process turns poor work into great work. Robert Frost is in the revision school.
Frost’s Method for Writing a Poem: Observation, Gestation, Revision
For Frost, a poem took a long time to develop. As Philip L. Gerber wrote [Robert Frost; page 100]: “The ineffable drive of one poetic element toward the other as a successful poem takes shape is not a sudden thing. A long time may be required for the creative process to ferment. When an idea is grasped, the poet must draw a workable parallel before he can express himself in language.”
Frost would observe something—on his farm, at the university, during any of his travels or events, and see a poem in it. Or rather, see something to be communicated that would be best communicated through a poem. The idea would then stay in his mind a long time. He would see how it could be expressed with metaphor, images, and symbols.
At some point, most likely a long time after the idea first came to him, he would begin to put something on paper. He would thus be juggling multiple poetic ideas at the same time, each in a different stage of gestation.
Observation was the key. “Poems then are created out of the storehouse of observations meticulously gathered” wrote Gerber. Frost learned to observe, and to translate his observations into poems. Once the mental dam was broken and the poem had essentially its final shape, Frost would fairly quickly turn it into a finished product.
Frost’s Notebooks Help in Understanding His Methods
Since Frost rejected the imagist and modernist movements and chose to write his poems in meter, often in rhyme, and always in some kind of form, it took him a long time to try different combinations of words and different order of lines. Frost did not keep the first drafts or intermediate drafts of his major and best known poems. But he did keep about forty notebooks in which were drafts of poems that are less well known.
In Frost’s notebooks the process is played out with a number of lesser known poems. Lines are written, and a few words crossed out and others added as Frost looked for the exact word that worked for meaning and form. Lines are grouped in a certain order, then re-grouped. Entire stanzas are marked with an X, and not used later. Sometimes several pages in a notebook are filled with trials of the same poem.
The poet of today does well to study the methods Frost used to compose a poem. While each poet must develop his own style, consideration of how one of the master’s did it is a good place to begin.
Sources:
Robert Frost by Philip L. Gerber, in Twayne’s Untied States Authors Series, revised edition 1982, G.K. Hall & Company, ISBN: 0-8057-7348-7
The Notebooks of Robert Frost , Ed. By Robert Faggen, 2006 The Belknap Press of Harvard University, ISBN-10: 0-674-02311-0
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