An earlier discussion exploring Robert Frost’s essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ highlighted its popularity and importance. As both an educator and a poet, delving into Frost’s often nuanced and challenging statements is rewarding. Here, we turn to his longer essay, ‘Education by Poetry,’ originally a talk at Amherst College and later published. Frost’s central argument posits that most knowledge, unlike mathematics, is relational and relies on metaphors. We live by crediting metaphors of self, love, art, nation, and deity. Education, Frost contends, should equip us with the awareness that these metaphors are provisional and will eventually break down. This idea aligns with his concept of a poem as a “clarification of life… a momentary stay against confusion.”
Frost’s writing is inherently inviting, drawing readers in even when tackling complex and profound subjects. In ‘Education by Poetry,’ he begins by suggesting he will merely “urge nothing,” content simply to consider and describe. It is only upon reflection that the reader grasps his seemingly reluctant stance on commitment as a fundamental aspect of his philosophy.
His focus is the treatment of poetry within the American education system. He notes one approach is outright exclusion, which he ironically admits “takes the onus off the poetry of having to be used to teach children anything.”
Only slightly less dismissive is the method employed by other institutions. They might include traditional poetic examples but “bar all that is poetical in it by treating it as something other than poetry.” Frost later clarifies what he means by “poetical,” but here he satirizes the practice of analyzing poems as if they were factual or scientific texts, or merely examining them for linguistic and technical elements like “syntax, language.”
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In a passage instantly recognizable to educators, Frost sarcastically concedes that this treatment of poetry is largely driven by the necessity of assigning grades. The straightforwardness of a marking system is appealing, but it inevitably narrows the evaluative focus to little beyond “accuracy, for correctness.” While still reserving his definition of the “poetical,” Frost tantalizes the reader by suggesting that such accuracy represents “the least part of my marking. The hard part is the part beyond that, the part where the adventure begins.” This adventure, he implies, lies in engaging with the true nature of a poetic text.
Having critiqued the abolition and denaturing of poetry as methods to manage its perceived “nuisance” in education, Frost considers a third approach: neutralizing it by assigning it to a “nowhere.” This method accepts poetry as a distinct discourse but exiles it to the “flowery,” positioning it in stark contrast to the “rigorous and righteous.” Here, poetry is reduced to mere entertainment, devoid of truth value or the capacity for knowledge. It occupies a space in the curriculum dedicated to “scatter[ing] brains over taste and opinion,” a domain difficult to quantify for assessment. Teachers might resort to “a general indefinite mark of X” in such courses, and without a robust marking regime, such pursuits can barely be termed ‘education.’ Frost’s tone is simultaneously sarcastic and deeply concerned, questioning the consequences of failing to educate individuals in taste and judgment.
The Big Idea
Coming closer to his core message, Frost genuinely laments this deficiency in education regarding taste and opinion. He highlights the increasing seriousness of this concern: many individuals leave education ill-equipped to navigate contemporary literature or safely judge material in libraries and galleries. They lack the critical skills needed to evaluate editorials or political campaigns.
This point is pivotal, as Frost reveals that beneath his self-deprecating humor and sarcasm lies a profound assertion: education has a responsibility to prepare young people for engaged citizenship, not just for skilled labor. Frost expects education to cultivate interpretive abilities, arguing that too many Americans finish school or college unable to “know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable.” He insists this is not merely science, syntax, or language study; rather, “metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about.” For Frost, understanding metaphor is fundamental to comprehending the world, and this understanding is best fostered through the study of poetry. Education about metaphor is education through poetry, leading to his declaration: “Education by poetry is education by metaphor.”
Frost then navigates through the concept of enthusiasm, which, much like taste, is challenging for academia to grade. Yet, Frost values it, particularly enthusiasm “taken through the prism of the intellect.” This prism metaphor suggests that intellectual processing refracts raw enthusiasm into various levels, from “something of overstatement, something of statement, and something of understatement.” The “prism of the intellect” is also referred to as “an idea.” Frost seems to advocate for a blend of passion and thought in enthusiasm – avoiding both cold assessment and thoughtless fanaticism.
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Returning to his main theme, Frost slightly reframes his argument, suggesting he has actually been discussing “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.” He then states his point more explicitly: “I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.” Metaphor, processed through intellect (an idea), serves as the lens through which emotional responses can yield knowledge. Frost is convinced that this awareness is not universal and that education focused on poetry can significantly enhance it.
Frost elaborates on the nature of metaphor itself. Its importance stems from its progression from “trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors” to “the profoundest thinking that we have.” This connects to the idea of “ulteriority”—the poetic method of “saying one thing and meaning another.” Frost views this not as an obscure literary concept but an almost instinctive human tendency. When people demand, “Why don’t you say what you mean?”, he responds, “We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets.” He suggests a human preference for parables, hints, and indirection, whether from diffidence or other instinct.
Frost makes bold claims for metaphorical thinking, stating his desire in later years to make metaphor “the whole of thinking,” excluding only “mathematical thinking.” He seeks to bring other forms of knowledge, including “scientific thinking,” within the scope of metaphor. He points to the Greeks’ foundational ideas about the world, the “All,” as fundamentally metaphorical, citing Pythagoras’ concept of things being comparable to number (“Number of what? Number of feet, pounds and seconds”). This, he argues, forms the basis of a scientific, empirical view of the world, explaining why it “has held and held” in the form of our dominant scientific perspective.
Frost highlights how even scientific views rely on metaphors. He mentions a visiting scientist who mixed spatial and temporal metaphors (“The two don’t go together”), and other modern metaphors such as a thing being “an event,” space being “something like curved,” particles possessing freedom, the “metaphor of evolution,” or the universe itself being “like unto a growing thing.” Frost aims to make his audience aware of the often-unrecognized role of such metaphors in both everyday understanding and sophisticated scientific perspectives. While acknowledging the brilliance and enduring applicability of the evolution metaphor, he insists that even it “will break down at some point.”
These ideas are crucial to Frost’s core argument about education by poetry robert frost. He posits that a lack of understanding regarding how metaphor functions leaves us “not safe.” We must comprehend “figurative values” to assess “the metaphor in its strength and its weakness.” Using an image reminiscent of his poem ‘Birches,’ he explains we won’t “know how far [we] may expect to ride it and when it may break down.” The critical point is that it will break down – like the boy bending the birch always returning to earth. Education should provide the experience and tools to recognize a “good metaphor, as far as it goes, and [we] must know how far.” As interpreted, Frost advocates for a more tentative, skeptical approach to human knowledge, recognizing its provisional nature because it is built upon metaphors destined to fail at some point, necessitating their replacement by better, more “brilliant” ones. The study of poetry offers experiences in figurative thinking and, through Frost’s own poems, often instills a sense of provisionality.
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Frost observes a human tendency to forget this provisional nature of knowledge, clinging to certain metaphorical ideas as totems. He critiques Freudianism’s emphasis on “mental health” as an example, noting how “the devil can quote Scripture,” meaning good words can be used for harmful purposes. The danger (“makes us not safe”) is illustrated by a dialogue where Frost, using a Socratic method, probes the limits of the metaphor that the universe is like a machine. He concludes 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 don’t know when it is going. You don’t 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.”
Frost shifts back to the classroom, redefining the exhortation for students to “Think.” It means “just putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another.” Alluding to his poem ‘After Apple-picking,’ he suggests explaining metaphor to students is like setting their feet “on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.” The most significant example of such metaphorical thinking is “the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter.” This attempt, like all metaphors, is ultimately destined to fail but represents “the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that attempts to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter.” Frost believes each realm is better understood through metaphors of the other. In the 1930s context, he foresaw the main danger as a potentially overly materialist worldview, warning that the “only materialist – be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman – is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul,” blind to the metaphors structuring his thought.
Frost then examines “trivial ones” from the Odyssey, such as a shield and seeds of fire, seeing them as foundational material for education by metaphor. This links back to his definition of a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion” from The Figure a Poem Makes, where he argued for living by one’s “trivial ones,” rather than others’ “big ones.” He reiterates, “[metaphor] is all there is of thinking.” Understanding metaphor doesn’t require writing poetry; reading it suffices, provided it is read “not as linguistics, not as history, not as anything but poetry.” The only viable assessment for a teacher of poetry readers is how “close” they come to the text. While vague, Frost insists “everything depends on the closeness with which you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else.”
Evidence of this “closeness” to poetry’s true nature (and thus to metaphor) is termed a form of “belief.” Frost outlines five such forms, each rooted in a conviction arising from perceiving a metaphorical connection between two things. Giving credence to this perceived connection, he argues, can lead to its fulfillment.
The first illustration is self-belief in a young person. He presents the example of a young woman seeing herself as an engineer, giving credence to that vision, and pursuing its fulfillment. Such metaphors, however, break down, which is more clearly acknowledged in his second example: “the belief of love.” The metaphor of a romantic relationship requires mutual credence to be pursued, but “the disillusionment that novels are full of is simply the disillusionment from disappointment in that belief. That belief can fail.” Discovering beautiful words in adorable poems for her can support this belief, just as finding fitting lines in i love you poems for your wife can strengthen a bond.
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The third form is literary or art belief, focused on the creation of a work of art. It arises not from calculation but from “belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be.” This is more “felt than known,” echoing The Figure a Poem Makes. The artist senses a connection to something beyond, credits it, and strives to fulfill the insight, bringing it into existence. This serves as the model for Frost’s fourth belief: God-belief. He is brief here, but the implication is that God is something brought into existence through our belief. Both literary and God-belief, like the belief of love often explored in romantic poems wife or captured in a simple poem on love, are liable to failure and breakdown. Education by poetry, emphasizing metaphor, helps us understand the provisional nature of these deeply held beliefs.
Frost’s final belief is national belief – a belief in a nation given credence and thus brought into fulfillment. The personal nature of these beliefs is highlighted by the painter’s palette metaphor. Frost resists being forced to adopt others’ metaphors, even cultural ones, seeing it as tyranny. This resistance stems partly from the eventual breakdown of all metaphors and partly from the need for personal agency: “I want my palette, if I am a painter, I want my palette on my thumb or on my chair, all clean, pure, separate colours. Then I will do the mixing on the canvas.” Whether creating self, love, art, God, or nation, the creation must be our own.
Interestingly, Frost concludes by reviewing and re-ordering the five areas of metaphorical belief. Each possesses a “shyness,” a reluctance to pronounce upon it until it has been pursued: “only the outcome can tell.” This perhaps explains Frost’s perceived elusiveness, the sense of provisional commitment. Even national belief “has got to be fulfilled, and we are not talking until we know more, until we have something to show.” This is clearly true for writing a poem, which arises “not of cunning and craft… but of real art.” He glosses this as “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.” Frost places God-belief in its traditional, ultimate position at the close: “And then finally the relationship we enter into with God to believe the future in – to believe the hereafter in.” The depth of human connection discussed within these beliefs, including family bonds, reminds us of the themes found in works like good poems for mothers day.
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In ‘Education by Poetry,’ Robert Frost presents a compelling argument for the vital role of poetry in developing critical thinking and navigating the complexities of life. By analyzing metaphor, the core mechanism of poetry, individuals gain the skills to understand not just literature, but also scientific theories, philosophical concepts, and the very beliefs by which we live. The essay asserts that true understanding comes from recognizing the power and the limitations of the metaphors that shape our knowledge and experience, fostering a healthy skepticism and appreciation for the provisional nature of truth. Education through poetry, Frost suggests, is not merely an academic exercise but a fundamental necessity for becoming an engaged, discerning, and capable individual in the world.