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Questions to answer in your Journal
while reading:
This essay by Frost is really what this course is about--"Education
by Poetry." Consequently, we will come back to it again and again
over the course of the year. Read it first to get an overall impression
of its argument; then, read it with the following questions in mind.
Your extensive Journal notes should house the answers to these questions:
1. What -- exactly-- does Frost say that "education by poetry"
is?
2. What --as exactly as you can find-- does Frost say metaphor is?
3. What --as exactly as you can find-- does Frost say thinking is?
4. What is the authors tone? Where and how does it change?
5. What passages capture your attention, arouse a reaction?
6. What does Frost mean by the term "closeness"?
7. How does Frost organize this piece? Can you connect the different
parts?
8. See if you can put in your own words the "Beliefs" that
end the essay.
9. What is your reaction to the essay? Is it an emotional one or a
logical one?
10. Read "After Apple Picking." I will argue in class that,
according to Frost's "definition" of metaphor in "Education
by Poetry," there
is one and only one explicit metaphor in the poem. See if you can
find it.
"Education by Poetry"
["Education by Poetry" was a talk delivered at Amherst College
and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst
Graduates Quarterly
of February 1931. It is from the conclusion of this piece that Mr.
Frost once extracted the text separately printed under the title "The
Four Beliefs."]
I am going to urge nothing in my talk. I am not an advocate. I am
going to consider a matter, and commit a description. And I am going
to describe other colleges than Amherst. Or, rather say all that is
good can be taken as about Amherst; all that is bad will be about
other colleges.
I know whole colleges where all American poetry is barredwhole
colleges. I know whole colleges where all contemporary poetry is barred.
I once heard of a minister who turned his daughterhis poetry-writing
daughterout on the street to earn a living, because he said
there should be no more books written; God wrote one book, and that
was enough. (My friend George Russell, "Æ", has read
no literature, he protests, since just before Chaucer.)
That all seems sufficiently safe, and you can say one thing for it.
It takes the onus off the poetry of having to be used to teach children
anything. It comes pretty hard on poetry, I sometimes think,what
it has to bear in the teaching process.
Then I know whole colleges where, though they let in older poetry,
they manage to bar all that is poetical in it by treating it as something
other than poetry. It is not so hard to do that. Their reason I have
often hunted for. It may be that these people act from a kind of modesty.
Who are professors that they should attempt to deal with a thing as
high and as fine as poetry? Who are they? There is a certain manly
modesty in that.
That is the best general way of settling the problem; treat all poetry
as if it were something else than poetry, as if it were syntax, language,
science. Then you can even come down into the American and into the
contemporary without any special risk.
There is another reason they have, and that is that they are, first
and foremost in life, markers. They have the marking problem to consider.
Now, I stand here a teacher of many years experience and I have
never complained of having had to mark. I had rather mark anyone for
anythingfor his looks, carriage, his ideas, his correctness,
his exactness, anything you please,I would rather give him a
mark in terms of letters, A, B, C, D than have to use adjectives on
him. We are all being marked by each other all the time, classified,
ranked, put in our place, and I see no escape from that. I am no sentimentalist.
You have got to mark, and you have got to mark, first of all, for
accuracy, for correctness. But if I am going to give a mark, that
is the least part of my marking. The hard part is the part beyond
that, the part where the adventure begins.
One other way to rid the curriculum of the poetry nuisance has been
considered. More merciful than the others it would neither abolish
nor denature the poetry, but only turn it out to disport itself, with
the plays and gamesin no wise discredited, though given no credit
for. Any one who liked to teach poetically could take his subject,
whether English, Latin, Greek or French, out into the nowhere along
with the poetry. One side of a sharp line would be left to the rigorous
and righteous; the other side would be assigned to the flowery where
they would know what could be expected of them. Grade marks where
more easily given, of course, in the courses concentrating on correctness
and exactness as the only forms of honesty recognized by plain people;
a general indefinite mark of X in the courses that scatter brains
over taste and opinion. On inquiry I have found no teacher willing
to take position on either side of the line, either among the rigors
or among the flowers. No one is willing to admit that his discipline
is not partly in exactness. No one is willing to admit that his discipline
is not partly in taste and enthusiasm.
How shall a man go through college without having been marked for
taste and judgment? What will become of him? What will his end be?
He will have to take continuation courses for college graduates. He
will have to go to night schools. They are having night schools now,
you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated
enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They dont
know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They
dont know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They
dont know how to judge a political campaign. They dont
know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable.
And metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about. Education by
poetry is education by metaphor.
Suppose we stop short of imagination, initiative, enthusiasm, inspiration
and originalitydread words. Suppose we dont mark in such
things at all. There are still two minimal things, that we have got
to take care of, taste and judgment. Americans are supposed to have
more judgment than taste, but taste is there to be dealt with. That
is what poetry, the only art in the colleges of arts, is there for.
I for my part would not be afraid to go in for enthusiasm. There is
the enthusiasm like a blinding light, or the enthusiasm of the deafening
shout, the crude enthusiasm that you get uneducated by poetry, outside
of poetry. It is exemplified in what I might call "sunset raving."
You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough,
eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is ohs and ahs
with you and no more.
But the enthusiasm I mean is taken through the prism of the intellect
and spread on the screen in a color, all the way from hyperbole at
one endor overstatement, at one endto understatement at
the other end. It is a long strip of dark lines and many colors. Such
enthusiasm is one object of all teaching in poetry. I heard wonderful
things said about Virgil yesterday, and many of them seemed to me
crude enthusiasm, more like a deafening shout, many of them. But one
speech had range, something of overstatement, something of statement,
and something of understatement. It had all the colors of an enthusiasm
passed through an idea.
I would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm
tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to
metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows
the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other peoples, the
discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated
in poetry.
Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace"
metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry
provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.
People say, "Why dont you say what you mean?" We never
do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in
parables and in hints and in indirectionswhether from diffidence
or some other instinct.
I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor
the whole of thinking. I find some one now and then to agree with
me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical,
or all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might
be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.
Once upon a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what
the All wasor was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth,
and water (we once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it
is only one). All was substance, said another. All was change, said
a third. But best and most fruitful was Pythagoras comparison
of the universe with number. Number of what? number of feet, pounds,
and seconds was the answer, and we had science and all that has followed
in science. The metaphor has held and held, breaking down only when
it came to the spiritual and psychological or the out of the way places
of the physical.
The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest
word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where
a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it
is moving. You can see why that would be so, without going back to
Zenos problem of the arrows flight. In carrying numbers
into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time
you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble. They
wont mix. The two dont go together.
Lets take two or three more of the metaphors now in use to
live by. I have just spoken of one of the new ones, a charming mixed
metaphor right in the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics:
that the more accurately you state where a thing is, the less accurately
you will be able to tell how fast it is moving. And, of course,
everything is moving. Everything is an event now. Another metaphor.
A thing, they say, is all event. Do you believe it is? Not quite.
I believe it is almost all event. But I like the comparison of a
thing with an event.
I notice another from the same quarter. "In the neighborhood
of matter space is something like curved." Isnt that a
good one! It seems to me that that is simply and utterly charmingto
say that space is something like curved in the neighborhood of matter.
"Something like."
Another amusing one is fromwhat is the book?I cant
say it now; but here is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to
your ideas of free will. It wants to give you back your freedom of
will. All right, here it is on a platter. You know that you cant
tell by name what persons in a certain class will be dead ten years
after graduation, but you can tell actuarially how many will be dead.
Now, just so this scientist says of the particles of matter flying
at a screen, striking a screen; you cant tell what individual
particles will collide, but you can say in general that a certain
number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that the individual
particle can come freely. I asked Bohr about that particularly, and
he said, "Yes , It is so. It can come when it wills and as it
wills; and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable.
But it is not so of the action of the mass. There you can predict."
He says, "That gives the individual atom its freedom, but the
mass its necessity.
Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all
our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going
into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing
plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite
a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything,
was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will
break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere. It is
a very brilliant metaphor, I acknowledge, though I myself get too
tired of the kind of essay that talks about the evolution of candy,
we will say, or the evolution of elevatorsthe evolution of this,
that, and the other. Everything is evolution. I emancipate myself
by simply saying that I didnt get up the metaphor and so am
not much interested in it.
What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor,
unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor,
you are not safe anywhere . Because you are not at ease with figurative
values: you dont know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness.
You dont know how far you may expect to ride it and when it
may break down with you. You are not safe with science; you are not
safe in history. In history, for instanceto show that [it] is
the same in history as elsewhereI heard somebody say yesterday
that Aeneas was to be likened unto (those words, "likened unto"!)
George Washington. He was that type of national hero, the middle-class
man, not thinking of being a hero at all, bent on building the future,
bent on his children, his descendents. A good metaphor, as far as
it goes, and you must know how far. And then he added that Odysseus
should be likened unto Theodore Roosevelt. I dont think that
is so good. Someone visiting Gibbon at the point of death, said he
was the same Gibbon as of old, still at his parallels.
Take the way we have been led into our present position morally, the
world over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a kind
of thinkingto speak metaphoricallythere is a kind of thinking
you might say was endemic in the brothel. It was always there. And
every now and then in some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the
world. And how does it do so? By using all the good words that virtue
has invented to maintain virtue. It uses honesty, first,frankness,
sinceritythose words; picks them up, uses them. "In the
name of honesty, let us see what we are." You know. And then
it picks up the word joy. "Let us in the name of joy, which is
the enemy of our ancestors, the Puritans . . . Let us in the name
of joy, which is the enemy of the kill-joy Puritan. . ." You
see. "Let us," and so on. And then, "In the name of
health . . ." Health is another good word. And that is the metaphor
Freudianism trades on, mental health. And the first thing we know,
it has us all in up to the top knot. I suppose we may blame the artists
a good deal, because they are great people to spread by metaphor.
The stage toothe stage is always a good intermediary between
the two worlds, the under and the upper,if I may say so without
personal prejudice to the stage.
In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote Scripture,
which simply means that the good words you have lying around the devil
can use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about
my morality. I am not here to urge anything. I dont care whether
the world is good or badnot on any particular day.
Let me ask you to watch a metaphor breaking down here before you.
Somebody said to me a little while ago, "It is easy enough for
me to think of the universe as a machine, as a mechanism."
I
said, "You mean the universe is like a machine?"
He said, "No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . . ."
"I think you mean the universe is like a machine."
"All right. Let it go at that."
I asked him, "Did you ever see a machine without a pedal for
the foot, or a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger?"
He said, "Nono."
I said, "All right. Is the universe like that?"
And he said, "No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . ."
". . . it is different from a machine," I said.
He wanted to go just that far with that metaphor and no further. And
so do we all. All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty
of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived
with it long enough you dont know when it is going. You dont
know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield.
It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.
I have heard this ever since I can remember, and ever since I have
taught: the teacher must teach the pupil to think. I saw a teacher
once going around in a great school and snapping pupils heads
with thumb and finger and saying, "Think." That was when
thinking was becoming the fashion. The fashion hasnt yet quite
gone out.
We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we
seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just
putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms
of another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of
a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.
Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is
the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit
in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest
attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the
height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all
poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and
spirit in terms of matter. It is wrong to call anybody a materialist
simply because he tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if
that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms
of matter. The only materialistbe he poet, teacher, scientist,
politician, or statesmanis the man who gets lost in his material
without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He
is the lost soul.
We ask people to think, and we dont show them what thinking
is. Somebody says we dont need to show them how to think;
bye and bye they will think. We will give them the forms of sentences
and, if they have any ideas, then they will know how to write them.
But that is preposterous. All there is to writing is having ideas.
To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
The
first little metaphor . . . Take some of the trivial ones. I would
rather have trivial ones of my own to live by than the big ones of
other people.
I remember a boy saying, "He is the kind of person that wounds
with his shield." That may be a slender one, of course. It goes
a good way in character description. It has poetic grace. "He
is the kind that wounds with his shield."
The shield reminds mejust to linger a minutethe shield
reminds me of the inverted shield spoken of in one of the books of
the "Odyssey," the book that tells about the longest swim
on record. I forget how long it lastedseveral days, was it?but
at last as Odysseus came near the coast of Phaeacia, he saw it on
the horizon "like an inverted shield."
There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end Odysseus comes
ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night under a double olive
tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse where it is hard to get
fireI am not quoting exactlywhere it is hard to start
the fire again if it goes out, they cover the seeds of fire with ashes
to preserve it for the night, so Odysseus covered himself with the
leaves around him and went to sleep. There you have something that
gives you character, something of Odysseus himself. "Seeds of
fire." So Odysseus covered the seeds of fire in himself. You
get the greatness of his nature.
But these are slighter metaphors than the ones we live by. They have
their charm, their passing charm. They are as it were the first steps
toward the great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the
end.
The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetrythat is
all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go but
it is the minds furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages
is the noble metaphors we have rolled tip.
I want to add one thing more that the experience of poetry is to
anyone who comes close to poetry. There are two ways of coming close
to poetry. One is by writing poetry. And some people think I want
people to write poetry, but I dont; that is, I dont
necessarily. I only want people to write poetry If they want to
write poetry. I have never encouraged anybody to write poetry that
did not want to write it, and I have not always encouraged those
who did want to write it. That ought to be ones own funeral.
It is a hard, hard life, as they say.
(I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city
they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you
do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for
you. But, I dont knowthe poetry written in that city might
not seem like poetry if read outside the city. It would be like the
jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate
them.)
But as I say, there is another way to come close to poetry, fortunately,
and that is in the reading of it, not as linguistics, not as history,
not as anything but poetry. It is one of the hard things for a teacher
to know how close a man has come in reading poetry. How do I know
whether a man has come close to Keats in reading Keats? It is hard
for me to know. I have lived with some boys a whole year over some
of the poets and have not felt sure whether they have come near what
it was all about. One remark sometimes told me. One remark was their
mark for the year; had to beit was all I got that told me what
I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark,
if it came close enough. I think a man might make twenty fool remarks
if he made one good one some time in the year. His mark would depend
on that good remark.
The closenesseverything depends on the closeness with which
you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing
else. And that will have to be estimated by chance remarks, not by
question and answer. It is only by accident that you know some day
how near a person has come.
The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more
about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays.
There are two or three places where we know belief outside of religion.
One of them is at the age of fifteen to twenty, in our self-belief.
A young man knows more about himself than he is able to prove to anyone.
He has no knowledge that anybody else will accept as knowledge. In
his foreknowledge he has something that is going to believe itself
into fulfilment, into acceptance.
There is another belief like that, the belief in someone else, a relationship
of two that is going to be believed into fulfilment. That is what
we are talking about in our novels, the belief of love. And the disillusionment
that the novels are full of is simply the disillusionment from disappointment
in that belief. That belief can fail, of course.
Then there is a literary belief. Every time a poem is written, every
time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but
by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing
to be, is more felt than known. There is a common jest, one that
always annoys me, on the writers, that they write the last end first,
and then work up to it; that they lay a train toward one sentence
that they think is pretty nice and have all fixed up to set like
a trap to close with. No, it should not be that way at all. No one
who has ever come close to the arts has failed to see the difference
between things written that way, with cunning and device, and the
kind that are believed into existence, that begin in something more
felt than known. This you can realize quite as wellnot quite
as well, perhaps, but nearly as wellin reading as you can
in writing. I would undertake to separate short stories on that
principle; stories that have been believed into existence and stories
that have been cunningly devised. And I could separate the poems
still more easily.
Now I thinkI happen to thinkthat those three beliefs that
I speak of, the self-belief, the love-belief, and the art-belief,
are all closely related to the God-belief, that the belief in God
is a relationship you enter into with Him to bring about the future.
There is a national belief like that, too. One feels it. I have been
where I came near getting up and walking out on the people who thought
that they had to talk against nations, against nationalism, in order
to curry favor with internationalism. Their metaphors are all mixed
up. They think that because a Frenchman and an American and an Englishman
can all sit down on the same platform and receive honors together,
it must be that there is no such thing as nations. That kind of bad
thinking springs from a source we all know. I should want to say to
anyone like that: "Look! First I want to be a person. And I want
you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please.
We can pull each others nosesdo all sorts of things. But,
first of all, you have got to have the personality. First of all,
you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international
as they please with each other."
I should like to use another metaphor on them. I want my palette,
if I am a painter, I want my palette on my thumb or on my chair, all
clean, pure, separate colors. Then I will do the mixing on the canvas.
the canvas where the work of art is, where we make the conquest. But
we want the nations all separate, pure, distinct, things as separate
as we can make them; and then in our thoughts, in our arts, and so
on, we can do what we please about it.
But I go back. There are four beliefs that I know more about from
having lived with poetry. One is the personal belief, which is a knowledge
that you dont want to tell other people about because you cannot
prove that you know. You are saying nothing about it till you see.
The love belief, just the same, has that same shyness. It knows it
cannot tell; only the outcome can tell. And the national belief we
enter into socially with each other, all together, party of the first
part, party of the second part, we enter into that to bring the future
of the country. We cannot tell some people what it is we believe,
partly, because they are too stupid to understand and partly because
we are too proudly vague to explain. And anyway it has got to be fulfilled,
and we are not talking until we know more, until we have something
to show. And then the literary one in every work of art, not of cunning
and craft, mind you, but of real art; that believing the thing into
existence, saying as you go more than you even hoped you were going
to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew
only with some sort of emotion. And then finally the relationship
we enter into with God to believe the future into believe the
hereafter in.
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