Robert Frost Essay.
“Why not have it imply everything?” Explain how this comment is reflected in Frost’s poems.
Throughout history, all poetry has said something and implied the rest. Robert Frost is famous for writing (in regard to writing poems) “why not have it imply everything”. This is reflected throughout his poems, most notably Mowing and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening as they both have deeper meanings hidden below what is most commonly deduced from an analysis of them. Frost uses a variety of literary techniques such as caesura and enjambment in various parts of each poem to establish his points (both stated and implied).
The Poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening consists of four nearly identical stanzas. Each line …show more content…
Frost supplicates us to question, “what does the scythe whisper?” yet if we stay grounded in reality, we must admit that scythes are incapable of human speech whether in whispered form or otherwise. Frost, in structuring his poem around a whispering scythe, allows the poem to imply much more than it actually states. Frost questions whether the reader or mower in the field can help but look behind and within the facts stated in the poem for something more than just what is written. This listening for whispers is portrayed as a basic human trait, and being more than just a universal aspect of human fragility, it is essential to the whole concept of poetry, literature and art. If these mediums are able to act as an articulation of truth, and this truth has basis in fact, then a great paradox exists within the central nature of poetry. For some form of imaginative leap must precede that articulation of truth. Someone must hear a scythe and question what it whispers, must be willing to think in terms of whispering scythe- in terms of “more than the truth” -before they are able to build a poem on the rejection of this notion- that scythes whisper nothing more than the fact of their own whispering. Without someone listening for whispers in the first place, there is no poem; without the labour of the poem, there is no articulation of the “sweet dream” of the facts it
“Why not have it imply everything?” Explain how this comment is reflected in Frost’s poems.
Throughout history, all poetry has said something and implied the rest. Robert Frost is famous for writing (in regard to writing poems) “why not have it imply everything”. This is reflected throughout his poems, most notably Mowing and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening as they both have deeper meanings hidden below what is most commonly deduced from an analysis of them. Frost uses a variety of literary techniques such as caesura and enjambment in various parts of each poem to establish his points (both stated and implied).
The Poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening consists of four nearly identical stanzas. Each line …show more content…
Frost supplicates us to question, “what does the scythe whisper?” yet if we stay grounded in reality, we must admit that scythes are incapable of human speech whether in whispered form or otherwise. Frost, in structuring his poem around a whispering scythe, allows the poem to imply much more than it actually states. Frost questions whether the reader or mower in the field can help but look behind and within the facts stated in the poem for something more than just what is written. This listening for whispers is portrayed as a basic human trait, and being more than just a universal aspect of human fragility, it is essential to the whole concept of poetry, literature and art. If these mediums are able to act as an articulation of truth, and this truth has basis in fact, then a great paradox exists within the central nature of poetry. For some form of imaginative leap must precede that articulation of truth. Someone must hear a scythe and question what it whispers, must be willing to think in terms of whispering scythe- in terms of “more than the truth” -before they are able to build a poem on the rejection of this notion- that scythes whisper nothing more than the fact of their own whispering. Without someone listening for whispers in the first place, there is no poem; without the labour of the poem, there is no articulation of the “sweet dream” of the facts it