Words From Robert Frost On What It Means to Be a Poet
Redefining poetry from the perspective of one of America’s most famous philosopher-poets
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” — Robert Frost
Robert Frost is my favorite poet, and a person who has changed not only the way I write poetry, but the way I live my life. Whenever I have a lot of difficulties and feel like the world is crashing on, I remind myself of Robert Frost’s old adage that life goes on.
In college, I turned frequently to Robert Frost’s poems to study but also for solace. I turned to the popular free verse poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken,” but I also turned to lesser-known, long-form dramatic poems like “The Lesson For Today,” “The Mountain,” and “Home Burial.” I have a tattoo on my abdomen from reading Frost’s take on memento mori.
To be honest — I have been comfortable writing poetry, being a poet, or even reading poetry. I often will read through a poem once and think “did I miss something?” Often, yes — I probably missed a lot of things.
But, to Robert Frost, “poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” To Frost, poetry was a condition, not a profession. Robert Frost wrote poetry because he was good at it, but later in his life, he wrote poetry because he needed to cope with unspeakable tragedy and, in his words, he needed to take life by the throat.
Lesser known than the virally famous “The Road Not Taken” is the incredible tragedy that Robert Frost underwent in his personal life. He outlived four of his six children, outlived his wife, lost his son, Carol to suicide, committed his daughter, Irma, to a mental hospital, as well as his younger sister, Jeannie.
We try not to take the personal life of any author as a motivation substitute for their life work — we should look at the work themselves.
What Robert Frost emphasizes through his words, however, is that we are all poets as human beings. I certainly didn’t think I could write very substantive poetry before I started studying and reading Robert Frost.
However, I found so much resonance with Robert Frost that I eventually became inspired to write…
