war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, 260 But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing 1. FIRST RESPONSE. Frost once described this poem as "a history of the United States in sixteen lines." Is it? What events in American history does the poem focus on? What does it leave out? The Gift Outright 1942 The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, 250 But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves 255 We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of 2. This poem is built on several paradoxes. How are the paradoxes in lines 1, 6, 7, and 11 resolved? Connection to Another Selection 1. Compare and contrast the theme and tone of this poem with those of E. E. Cummings's “next to of course god america i.” Perspectives on Robert Frost Robert Frost "In White" An Early Version of Design 1912 A dented spider like a snow drop white On a white Heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of lifeless satin cloth - Saw ever curious eye so strange a sight? - 265 Portent in little, assorted death and blight Like the ingredients of a witches' broth? - The beady spider, the flower like a froth, And the moth carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, 270 The blue prunella every child's delight. What brought the kindred spider to that height? (Make we no thesis of the miller's plight.) What but design of darkness and of night? Design, design! Do I use the word aright? • 1 miller moth Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing 1. Read "In White" and "Design" aloud. Which version sounds better to you? Why? 2. Compare these versions line for line, paying particular attention to word choice. List the differences and try to explain why you think Frost revised the lines. 3. How does the change in titles reflect a shift in emphasis in the poem? Robert Frost On the Luring Part of a Poem 1914 The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom, and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation.... It is the most volatile and at the same time important part of poetry. It goes and the language becomes dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length there is no denying. But the accent of sense supersedes all other accent, overrides it and sweeps it away. I will find you the word come variously used in various passages, a whole, half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth note. It is as long as the sense makes it. When men no longer know the intonations on which we string our words they will fall back on what I may call the absolute length of our syllables, which is the length we would give them in passages that meant nothing.... I say you can't read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. Neither can you with the help of all the characters and diacritical marks pronounce a single word unless you have previously heard it actually pronounced. Words exist in the mouth not books, Considerations for Critical Thinking abroma letter to Sidney Cox in A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost 1. FIRST RESPONSE. Why does Frost place so much emphasis on hearing poetry spoken? 2. Choose a passage from "Birches" and read it aloud. How does Frost's description of his emphasis on intonation help explain the effects he achieves in the passage you have selected? 3. Do you think it is true that all poetry must be heard? Do "[w]ords exist in the mouth not books"? Amy Lowell (1874-1995) On Frost's Realiste Technique 1915 I have said that Mr. Frost's work is almost photographic. The qualification was unnecessary, it is photographic. The pictures, the characters are reproduced directly from life, they are burnt into his mind as though it were a sensitive plate. He gives out what has been put in unchanged by any personal mental process. His imagination is bounded by what he has seen, he is confined within the limits of his experience (or at least what might have been his experience) and bent all one way like the windblown trees of New England hillsides. From a review of North of Boston, The New Republic, February 20, 1915 Considerations for Critical Thinking and writing 1. Consider the "photographic" qualities of Frost's poetry by discussing particular passages that strike you as having been reproduced directly from life." 2. Write an essay that supports or refutes Lowell's assertion that "[Frost) gives out what has been put in unchanged by any personal mental process." Robert Frost On the Figure a Poem Makes 1939 Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why can't we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can't in practice. Our lives for it. Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poema sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context - meaning - subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters - particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on meters 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. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience. Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem's better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way 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. Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood -- and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad - the happy-sad blend of the drinking song. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. 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. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps going. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days. I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. 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. Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work for
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