The Figure a Poem Makes, by Robert Frost | Writings in Poeticous

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 poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre 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 metres-particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were s

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