Frost: ‘Education by Poetry’

 Robert Frost said: 

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

 

Frost held that thinking is learning to manage metaphors. That’s best taught through poetry.

The argument takes off like this: Poetry educates in metaphor, and if you can’t handle a metaphor, you cannot be trusted to safely handle questions about science, history or philosophy. Zeno’s Paradox was a mixed metaphor, mixing the concept of number with the concept of space-time. Arguments about free also involve errors of metaphor. Statistical scientists know that what can be said generally about people cannot be said of an individual, who was not likely to have 2.5 children, even in a previous and imaginary golden age.

Frost said a person who studied the poets would learn how a metaphor could enlighten and how it could break down. Frost held that education in poetry was priceless.

 

I would be willing to throw away everything but that: enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.

 

I read Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” with pleasure, not much concerned about whether it was true. But it reminded me that in an earlier life I knew a philosopher who used to have a standing lamentation. When we’d get stuck working on a problem, he’d say: What we need is a better metaphor.

• Source: “Education by Poetry” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. The quotations are on pp. 108 and 104.