twenty-fifth poem

P.S.: Do you in constructing your books generally have that idea of coherence in mind?

Wright: Every time. Did I mention to you Robert Frost's remark — it is a very Horatian remark — that if you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth? And I have tried that every time, every time.

—James Wright, interview with Peter Stitt, James Wright: A Profile (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1988) edited by Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt.

actualist

I’m not a realist but an actualist. I set down nothing that hasn’t…to my knowledge actually happened in words and tones I have actually heard.

—Robert Frost, The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Belknap Press, Harvard UP, 2007), edited by Robert Faggen

bric-a-brac

"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic," said Stevens. "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive," retorted Frost. "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects." "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

—Lawrence Roger Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), p. 61, recounting an exchange between Stevens & Frost in Key West in 1940.

metaphoric flaw

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.

—Robert Frost, "Education By Poetry"

momentary stay against confusion

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.

—Robert Frost, "The Figure A Poem Makes"