Poetic response journal of robert frost essay

Frost is atypical as a poet because he uses a wide variety of forms and rhyme schemes in his poetry. However, in each case, Frost does not seem to select a specific form simply for the sake of having a difficult form to work with.

In a number of poems, such as ‘Spring Pools’, the imagery caries the meaning. Frost uses precise details to re-create the colour, texture and sounds of the world within the poem. This makes his poetry richly sensuous. Yet, using the same technique, he can paint a cold, bleak scene that is chillingly realistic.

Frost used repetition for effect, to emphasise, and to add to the musical quality of his verse. He described sound in the poem as ‘the gold in the ore’, and added that ‘the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other’.

In an introductory essay to his collected poems, Frost insists that a poem “will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went,” an observation that applies to most of his three hundred-odd poems.