Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” talks about his own perception of how a poem should be and how people should view a poem.

1. The Figure
a Poem Makes
- Robert Frost
S. Mohan Raj
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2.  American poet Robert Frost, a
four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in
poetry, depicted realistic New
England life through his poetic
language and situations.
 Born on March 26, 1874. He
was a special guest at President
John F. Kennedy’s inauguration,
Frost became a poetic force and
the unofficial ‘poet laureate’ of
the United States.
 He died of complications from
prostate surgery on January 29,
1963.
Early Years
1) Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California.
2) He spent 11 years there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost
Jr., died of tuberculosis.
3) Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence,
Massachusetts.
4) Frost attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future love and
wife, Elinor White.

3. Early Years…
 Frost attended Dartmouth College for several
months.
 In 1894, he had his first poem, “My Butterfly: an
Elegy,” published in The Independent, a weekly
literary journal.
 Frost married Elinor on Dec 19, 1895, and had
their first child, Elliot, in 1896, had their second
child, Lesley in 1899.
 In 1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to
a farm in New Hampshire stayed there for 12 years.
 Though it was a fruitful time for Frost's writing, it
was a difficult period in his personal life.
 Frost’s first son, Elliot, died of cholera in 1900.
 After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more
children: son Carol (1902), who commit suicide in
1940; Irma (1903), who later developed mental
illness; Marjorie (1905), who died in her late 20’s
after giving birth; and Elinor (1907), who died just
weeks after she was born.
 Additionally, during that time, Frost and Elinor
attempted several endeavors, including poultry
farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful.
 It was during this time Frost acclimated himself to
rural life.

4. Public Recognition for Poetry
 In 1912, Frost moved to England. He was
38 when he printed his first book of poems, A
Boy’s Will, followed by North of Boston.
 He met fellow poets Ezra Pound and
Edward Thomas, two men who would affect
his life in significant ways.
 Pound and Thomas were the first to review
his work in a favourable light and provide
significant encouragement.
 Frost credited Thomas's long walks over
the English landscape as the inspiration for
one of his most famous poems, “The Road Not
Taken.”
 After World War I broke out in August
1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return to
America.
 When Frost arrived back home, he was
well-received by the literary world.

5.  In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled down on a farm in New
Hampshire.
 Frost began a long career as a teacher at several colleges,
reciting poetry to eager crowds and writing all the while.
 He taught at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan, has a
most significant association with Amherst College, where he
taught steadily during the period from 1916 to 1938.
 For a period of more than 40 years beginning in 1921, Frost
also spent almost every summer and fall at Middlebury College,
teaching English on its campus in Ripton, Vermont.
 During his lifetime, Frost would receive more than 40
honorary degrees, and in 1924, he was awarded his first of four
Pulitzer Prizes, for his book New Hampshire.
 He would subsequently win Pulitzers for Collected
Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943).
 Elinor died in 1938 diagnosed with cancer and also had had a
long history of heart trouble.
 In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold
Medal.
 A year later, at the age of 86, Frost was honoured and asked to
recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration.
 On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to
prostate surgery.

6. The Figure a Poem Makes
- Robert Frost

10. The Figure a Poem Makes
Sir Henry Irving said that a good actor
makes the mould for his form in the company
with which he acts. He cannot fit himself into the
mould left by another actor.
The figure pleases at the moment for it
suggests Robert Frost’s phrase in the preface to
the beautiful new volume of “The Collected
Poems of Robert Frost”: “The figure a poem
makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
The figure is the same for love.”
The first line commits the poet and he
moves on, surprised himself at the poem that
forms. The figure is the same, too, for a poet. He
begins in delight and ends in wisdom, and
between the beginning and the ending has
formed the pattern of the life that a poet lives.

11. Frost has been called a realist and also an
idealist. It is one of the several paradoxes of his nature
that he is both and neither.
His comment—though I think he has never
put it in print—has often been quoted as to the kind of
realist he is. He does not hand you the potato with all the
dirt on it. He scrubs the potato to form. He has said in a
talk that he is not an idealist but an “idea-ist.” He has
not seen a vision of a perfect world through parting
clouds in the sky.
He believes in working, with what implements
and methods there are, toward the realization of the best
ideas you have been able to think through in your mind.
He is an individualist, not an institutionalist.

12. A man needs the courage that grows out
of his loneliness, he needs the strength he develops
by standing alone. All the virtues, for Frost, begin
with one and grow from one to two, and two by two.
He invites you as a poet, not in groups but singly.
“You come, too,” he says in
“The Pasture,” a poem that is the
foreword poem in each of his collected volumes.
The moral in his early poem, “The Tuft of Flowers,”
is that no man works alone; but the message of the
uncut blossoms that the reaper left comes to the
other worker by himself.
Frost is not a collectivist. His conception
of the adequate man is as self-centred, self-
contained, self-directed, but not self-sufficient. Not
every man by himself, to himself, for himself; but
every man in himself, through himself and from
himself. “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

13. The figure is the same for love. That is the secret of a
good poem or a good axe helm. It is also the secret of a good
poet and a good life. Lovers are by twos and twos and the
revolution in America that will count is a one-man revolution.
With no arithmetic but twice one is two he, gets in all because
somehow every two is one and all the ones make together with
the sum of the whole. That is a paradox, also, that the
institutionalist cannot resolve.
Emerson said in effect somewhere that a general’s
philosophy is more important than the number of his troops. A
man is what he believes, he meant. I think Frost would judge a
man by what he loves. What counts is what begins in delight
and ends in wisdom. The obligations, the requirements, the
other person’s standards are not what matters. The test of this
view is in his poems almost anywhere.
Home is not “the place where, when you have to go
there, they have to take you in,” it is “something you somehow
haven’t to deserve.” It’s yours by force of love or something like
it, for loyalty is a degree of love.

14. Perhaps an understanding of Robert Frost’s
philosophy of every man’s right to his own life and his
way of life is the best explanation of his position in the
United States today.
Foremost living American poet and, since
Yeats’ death, first of living poets of the English tongue,
he stands neither as a great national figure nor even as
a great symbol, as Yeats did. He stands as a great and
individual figure of a man and a poet. He seems even a
lonely figure. Yet, he has friends everywhere. He
belongs to no group, he has established no cult.
We shall not say “After Frost,” as they say
“After Pound” or “After Eliot.” But his “tuft of flowers”
gladdens and will gladden the hearts separately of
thousands who never heard the sound of his scythe.
An understanding of him begins in delight and ends in
wisdom. The figure is the same for love. That is the
figure, too, that a poet makes.

15. Paragraphs 1-3
Frost opens in the middle of a battle against
what he calls “abstraction”, long accepted as part of the
philosophic method but now – in the first half of the
20th century – “a new toy” in the hands of poets.
This idea occupies the opening 3 paragraphs of
the essay. It is the temptation to separate the constituent
elements of a poem and to elevate or prioritize one over
all others.
Frost’s faux-infantile tone here suggests he will
not be offering any approval of this method (“Why can’t
we have anyone quality of poetry we choose by itself? . . .
Our lives for it.”). He floats the idea of focusing only on
the sound a poem makes – “sound is the gold in the ore”.
He’s thinking of the experiments in the sound of a
Mallarme, a Tennyson, or a Swinburne, the lush
aestheticism of a few years before. It may also be relevant
that, in the UK, Dylan Thomas’ early work had appeared
in the mid-1930s.

16. Paragraphs 1-3…
Frost’s doubts about such approaches to poetic
composition take a surprising form. From the premise that
“the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as
different as possible from each other” he argues that a
reliance solely on linguistic and formal elements (“that of
vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences,
metre”) is never going to be enough to achieve this aim. If we
abstract for use only the sonic and formal elements of poetry,
“(a)ll that can be done with words is soon told”.
Frost is known for his interest in form (as against
other Modernists’ scepticism about it) so it’s with some
surprise that we hear him say: “So also with metres –
particularly in our language where there are virtually but two,
strict iambic and loose iambic.
The ancients with many (more varieties of metre)
were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is
painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point
of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony”.

17. Paragraphs 1-3…
With this Frostian chuckle, it’s clear that only
monotony results from this approach and also that the poet
can only gain relief from it with “the help of context-
meaning-subject matter”. This clumsy, composite term is
quickly honed down to the single word “meaning” (later in
this essay he uses “theme” and “subject” to refer to the same
thing). This is Frost’s argument against the lure of
abstraction.
The poet – even merely to achieve poems which
sound as different as possible from each other – must have
something to say, must mean something. The limits of pure
sound/form can be breached once the meaning is
played across the sonic/formal qualities of language. For me,
this gives rise to images of a jazz soloist improvising across
the rhythms of a band.
For Frost: “The possibilities for a tune from the
dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a
limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as
merely one more art of having something to say”.

18. Paragraphs 1-3…
The third paragraph opens: “Then
there is this wildness whereof it is spoken”. The
quasi-Biblical turn of phrase here suggests irony
is again at work and it is the second form of
abstraction that Frost is mocking.
The “wildness” of a poem is the way
its component parts are related – or not – to
each other. He mocks the kind of “Poem” –
notes the ironic upper-case – that results from
those who seek “to be wild with nothing to be
wild about”.
Though the sudden switches of focus,
the jump-cuts of strong emotion, the leaps and
gulfs of epiphanic moments are certainly (Frost
implies) part of great poetry, the Modern(ist)
abstractionist will want the leaps and jumps
“pure”.

19. Paragraphs 1-3…
Frost is again concerned about the lack of
“context-meaning-subject matter” in this kind of
poetry. He is taking aim at Surrealism with its reliance
on irrational leaps, its dislocation of the senses, the
shock value of the illogical.
For Frost, such practices lead only “to
undirected associations and kicking ourselves from
one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of
a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper”.
To create poetry that has something to say,
Frost suggests for the second time that “Theme alone
can steady us down… a subject that shall be fulfilled”.

20. Paragraphs 4–6
The essay now moves away from the
constituents of a poem to the process of its writing, a
process Frost sees as organic, instinctive, unpredictable,
exploratory, holistic, and – like love – an experience and
source of pleasure. This is where he uses the title phrase
and the figure of a poem turns out to be ‘the course run’ by
the poem, its track or trail or locus.
The elliptical sequencing of the next few
paragraphs doesn’t help the reader but Frost considers 5
areas: the poem’s origins, its development, its impact on
writer and reader, the importance of the poet’s freedom.

21. Paragraphs 4–6…
The delight with which a poem begins is “the surprise
of remembering something I didn’t know I knew”. I don’t think
this need be a literal recalling (on this Frost is not Wordsworth)
but an insight or sense of a connection between things which has
a familiarity and feels like a remembrance. (The way in which
metaphor is at the root of poetry and, perhaps, all knowledge is a
point Frost developed in ‘Education by Poetry’ (1931)).
The substance of this initial insight is what constitutes
at least the beginnings of the “context-meaning-subject matter”
so essential to any successful poem.
All poets will recognise such a moment as Frost
describes: “I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized
from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition
of the long lost and the rest follows.” But from such momentary
delight and recognition (which will be accompanied by powerful
emotions, even tears), Frost makes it clear the process, the
figure, of the poem’s making, still lies ahead and is one of
surprise and discovery.

22. Paragraphs 4–6…
As the poem struggles to exist, the poet must remain alert and
watchful to what may help build it as “it inclines to the impulse, it
assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky
events”.
It is a fundamentally metaphorical process of making
connections, often quite unforeseen ones: “The impressions most useful
to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note
of at the time”.
In a striking image, Frost suggests we are like giants, drawing
on elements of previous experience and hurling them ahead of us as a
way of paving a pathway into our own future. We make sense of what we
encounter by reference to what we have experienced in the past. It’s in
this way that a poem is able to result in “a clarification of life – not
necessarily a great clarification, such as (religious) sects and cults are
founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”
Our pathway ahead is illuminated, even if only briefly, by the
ordering and landscaping the poem creates towards future experience by
reference to what we already know.

23. Paragraphs 4–6…
This is why Frost teasingly argues the logic of a good
poem is “backward, in retrospect”. What it must not be (and he
has his earlier abstractionist targets in mind again) is pre-
conceived or imposed before the fact (even if what we pre-
impose is the illogical kicking ourselves from one chance
suggestion to another).
Such willed pre-conception can never yield anything
other than a “trick poem”. It is not a prophecy, but rather
something “felt”, a feeling figure, an emotional response
involving both past and future and it must be “a revelation, or a
series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.”

24. Paragraphs 4–6…
The crucial role of emotion is perhaps easily missed.
And to allow the role of the passions, Frost insists on the
greatest freedom of the poetic materials to move about, to be
moved about, to establish relations regardless of time and
space, previous relation, and everything but affective affinity.
This is Frost’s answer to one of the writer’s constant
quandaries: how true to the original experience must I be? For
Frost, truth to the emotional response at the
inception of the poem (not necessarily the original incident’s
emotional charge) is key and that demands artistic
independence and freedom. Some distance is required.

25. Paragraph 7
The essay comes to concentrate finally on the necessary
freedoms of the poet. The artist’s freedom is the freedom to raid his
own experiences: “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my
material – the condition of body and mind now and then to summons
aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” It’s in this
freedom that Frost contrasts scholars/academics and artists.
Scholars work from knowledge. But so do artists – this is
the point of the early paragraphs of the essay. But the two groups
come by their knowledge in quite different ways. Scholars get theirs
via conscientious and thorough-going linearity of purpose.
Poets, on the other hand, acquire their cavalierly and just as
it happens, whether in or out of books. Poets ought to “stick to
nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where
they walk in the fields”. Poets do not learn by assignment, Frost says,
not even by self-assignment.

26. Paragraph 7…
In the course of the figure a new poem may be making, the poet
must assert his liberty to work in a dramatically metaphorical way, to be
possessed of both “originality” and “initiative” in order to be able to snatch
“a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with
not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic”.
Frost concludes with another vivid image of the poem making its
figure in the course of composition. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the
poem must ride on its own melting.” The aptness of the image lies partly in
the ice’s gradual vanishing (what a poem can offer is only ever “momentary”)
and the frictionless quality reflects Frost’s insistence that a poem cannot be
“worried into being” through pre-conceived effortfulness.
The ice’s movement is generated and facilitated by its own process
of melting and the poem too must propel itself (not be propelled by the
artist). The resulting figure follows an unpredictable and fresh course, the
links it draws from both past and present towards the future offering
temporary clarifications of all three for the poet and (something Frost does
not explore here) perhaps finally broadcast, available and effective for its
readers too.

27. SUMMARY 2
 Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes”
talks about his own perception of how a poem should
be and how people should view a poem.
 He mentions that all poems should be distinct from
one another and should have wisdom that the readers
can benefit from, not only to entertain them.
 The poem should also evoke its readers to discover
something they previously do not know, but they
actually know from the start.
 Frost also noted the relationship between the
writer’s emotions while writing the poem and the
reader’s emotion while reading the poem.
 At the end of his essay, Frost asserted that poems
are eternal—that they will forever bear their wisdom
and truth.

28. ANALYSIS
1. The author’s main argument in this essay is that each
poem should be unique enough to be distinguished
from one another and that they should not only be
made in order to entertain the readers but to give
them wisdom—that poems should “begin in delight
and end in wisdom” (Frost, par. 4).
2. The author also argued that sounds are not just the
only basis that makes a poem “sound”—that is,
according to the rules of logic.
3. However, Frost also made clear the distinction of the
logic of scholars and artists—with the artist’s (such as
poets) logic is backward (par. 6), thus utterly
suggesting that scholars and other masters of
philosophy have totally different views of life, much
less than art and poetry as he noted that “Scholars and
artists thrown together are often annoyed at the
puzzle of where they differ” (par. 7).

29. ANALYSIS…
1. He also added that “scholars get theirs with
conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of
logic; poets theirs [knowledge] cavalierly and as it
happens in and out of books,” which suggests that
poetry cannot be measured by logic or evaluated
through the means of scholars.
2. Perhaps, the author is suggesting that poems are best
evaluated through emotion. This assertion can be seen
with the author’s words when he stated “no tears in the
writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the
writer, no surprise for the reader” (par. 5).
3. This line also suggests the link between the poet’s
feelings when he writes the poem and the feelings that
the readers get when they read the poem—this is one of
the greatest achievement that a poet can have, to be
able to convey his feelings through his writings.

30. Many people, though, might question Frost’s authority
for his assertion. Note that this essay was written in 1939. By that
time, Robert Frost has achieved the status as a known and much-
acclaimed poet of his era. His being this well-known and well-
respected poet of this time gave him the needed authority to talk
about the figures that poems make or how poems should be
treated and taken by people.
Most of the things that he argued in his essays are the
things that he had already achieved by then especially the being
the poem’s originality and flow “from delight to wisdom” as
observed from his poems such as “The Road Not Taken,”
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,”
and “Fire and Ice” among others.

31. 1. https://www.poeticous.com/frost/the-figure-a-poem-makes
2. https://martyncrucefix.com/2017/07/04/the-meaning-of-robert-frosts-the-figure-a-poem-makes/
3. https://lostboy.blog/2013/02/18/an-analysis-of-robert-frosts-the-figure-a-poem-makes/
4. https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/summary/
5. https://redtreetimes.com/2017/10/25/the-figure-a-poem-makes/https://rampages.us/gleporati/2017/02/14/robert-
frost-the-figure-a-poem-makes/
6. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/1/30/robert-frost-winner-of-4-pulitzer/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost
8. https://www.biography.com/writer/robert-frost
9. https://sites.google.com/site/khaguu/class-project/english/robert-frost
10. https://www.vqronline.org/figure-poet-makes
Works Cited