Robert Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry,” originally a talk delivered at Amherst College, stands as a profound exploration of poetry’s indispensable role in understanding the world. Far from being a mere academic exercise or a source of pleasant diversion, Frost posits that poetry, particularly through its mastery of metaphor, is fundamental to how we think, learn, and navigate the complexities of life. For anyone interested in the depth of poetry Frost, this essay offers a unique lens through which to appreciate his broader artistic philosophy and his view on what it truly means to be educated.
Frost begins with characteristic indirection, suggesting he will “urge nothing,” but merely consider and describe. This deliberate humility masks a deeply held conviction about the superficial ways poetry was often treated in American education during his time. He critiques several common approaches, each failing to grasp the true “poetical” essence of the art form.
One method, Frost observes with irony, is to simply bar poetry from the curriculum altogether. This, he notes, conveniently “takes the onus off the poetry of having to be used to teach children anything.” It absolves educators of the perceived “nuisance” of dealing with poetry’s less quantifiable aspects.
A slightly less drastic but equally problematic approach is to permit poetry but “bar all that is poetical in it.” This happens when poems are treated merely as sources of conventional knowledge, like “science,” or are dissected solely for technical features such as “syntax, language.” This reduces a vibrant work of art to a specimen for linguistic analysis, ignoring its deeper function.
Frost wryly acknowledges that the pressure to assess and mark students often drives this reductive approach. The “brute simplicity of a marking regime” focused on “accuracy, for correctness” can be attractive, but it misses the true adventure of engaging with a poetic text. The real challenge, the part “where the adventure begins,” lies beyond mere technical correctness.
Beyond banning or denaturing poetry, a third method is to exile it to a realm of irrelevance – the “flowery,” the opposite of the “rigorous and righteous.” Here, poetry becomes mere entertainment, devoid of truth or the capacity for knowledge. It might feature in courses scattering “brains over taste and opinion,” but because such subjective areas are hard to mark, these courses struggle to be considered ‘education’ at all in the conventional sense. education by poetry robert frost highlights this tension.
Frost expresses genuine lament for this lack of education in taste and opinion. He links it directly to a deficiency in critical thinking skills essential for citizenship. Students not educated in engaging deeply with creative and persuasive language are ill-equipped to “find their way around in contemporary literature,” judge editorials, or evaluate political campaigns. Crucially, they may not “know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable.”
This brings Frost to his central point: “metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about.” Understanding how metaphor works is not a peripheral literary skill; it is a fundamental aspect of understanding the world itself. Education through poetry, then, becomes education by metaphor.
While touching briefly on the difficulty of assessing “enthusiasm” in education, Frost links it back to his core argument. He suggests that enthusiasm needs to be “taken through the prism of the intellect,” which he equates with an “idea” or, more specifically, “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.” It is through metaphor that our emotional responses are processed and projected to gain knowledge.
Frost unequivocally states, “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, he argues, starts in “trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors” but extends to “the profoundest thinking that we have.”
He connects this to the poetic method of “saying one thing and meaning another,” which he sees not as an obscure technique but a basic human inclination. We prefer indirection, hints, and parables – “being all of us too much poets” – because it reflects a fundamental way our minds connect disparate ideas.
Alt text: Vintage black and white photo of Robert Frost speaking at a podium, emphasizing his role as an educator and speaker on poetry.
Frost makes a bold claim: “I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking,” excluding only mathematical thought. He argues that even scientific thinking is deeply rooted in metaphor, citing the ancient Greek idea of the “All” as fundamentally metaphorical, such as Pythagoras comparing the nature of things to number. This metaphorical foundation, based on measurement (“Number of what? Number of feet, pounds and seconds”), underlies the enduring scientific view of the world. robert frost poetry often explores complex ideas through tangible metaphors.
He offers examples of modern scientific metaphors – space being “curved,” things being “events,” individual particles having “freedom,” and the overarching “metaphor of evolution” or the universe as a “growing thing.” Frost wants us to recognize these as metaphors, powerful and applicable, but ultimately provisional.
This provisional nature is crucial. Frost argues that a lack of understanding of metaphor leaves us “not safe.” We must be able to assess the “figurative values,” knowing the metaphor’s “strength and its weakness.” Using an image reminiscent of his poem ‘Birches,’ he explains we must know “how far [we] may expect to ride it and when it may break down.”
The key insight is that all metaphors will break down at some point. Education, through poetry, should equip us with the experience to recognize a “good metaphor, as far as it goes,” and critically understand “how far.” Frost advocates for a more tentative, skeptical approach to knowledge, acknowledging its basis in metaphors that will eventually need to be replaced by more “brilliant” ones. Studying poetry provides this experience of figurative thinking and the sense of provisionality often embedded in poetic works.
We tend to forget this provisionality, taking metaphorical ideas and turning them into rigid doctrines. Frost critiques the Freudian focus on “mental health” as an example, where good concepts are used in limited, even dangerous ways. He illustrates this with a dialogue where he pushes the limits of the universe-as-a-machine metaphor. He concludes, “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it… It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.”
Alt text: A teacher pointing at a blackboard, symbolizing education and the transmission of ideas, linking to the theme of poetry's role in learning.
Returning to the classroom, Frost defines “Thinking” not as abstract calculation but as “just putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another.” Drawing on imagery from ‘After Apple-picking,’ he suggests that explaining metaphor is to “set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.”
The highest form of this metaphorical thinking, according to Frost, is the “philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter.” While acknowledging this attempt is ultimately doomed to fail – like all metaphors – he calls it “the height of poetry, the height of all thinking.” He worries about a purely materialist worldview, stating, “The only materialist… 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” because he is blind to the underlying metaphors shaping his understanding. poems by frost frequently explore philosophical themes through concrete imagery.
Frost circles back to “trivial” metaphors from the Odyssey as the raw material for this education. He echoes his idea from “The Figure a Poem Makes” that a poem is a “momentary stay against confusion,” preferring one’s own small metaphors to the “big ones of other people.” He reiterates that understanding metaphor “is all there is of thinking.”
Crucially, one doesn’t have to write poetry to understand metaphor; reading it suffices, provided it’s read “not as linguistics, not as history, not as anything but poetry.” The only valid assessment for a teacher is how “close” a student comes to the poem – a vague measure, perhaps, but one Frost insists “everything depends on.”
This “closeness” to poetry, and thus to metaphor, is termed a form of “belief.” Frost outlines five such forms, each representing a metaphorical connection given credence and pursued towards fulfillment:
- Self-belief: A young person envisioning a future self and believing it into existence.
- Belief of love: The mutual credence given to the metaphor of a romantic relationship, acknowledged by Frost as subject to “disillusionment.”
- Literary or art belief: The artist sensing a connection or a “little charm” and believing it into existence through creation, “more felt than known.”
- God-belief: The implication that God is something we bring into existence through our belief, also subject to potential failure.
- National belief: Giving credence to the metaphor of a nation and working towards its fulfillment.
Alt text: Female engineer looking thoughtfully at a blueprint, representing self-belief and the pursuit of a chosen path as a form of metaphorical creation.
Frost uses the metaphor of the painter’s palette to emphasize the personal nature of these beliefs. He wants his own clean, separate colors (“palette on my thumb or on my chair”) to do the mixing on the canvas himself, resisting the “tyranny” of being forced to adopt others’ metaphors. Whether creating self, love, art, God, or nation, we must make our own.
In his conclusion, Frost revisits these beliefs, noting the “shyness” surrounding them – their outcome is uncertain until pursued. This explains his own perceived slipperiness; commitment is provisional until the metaphor is realized. He emphasizes that writing a poem, like other forms of creation, arises not from calculation but from “real art,” “believing the thing into existence,” and coming “with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion.” He places God-belief last, suggesting it represents the ultimate relationship where we “believe the future in – to believe the hereafter in.”
Ultimately, Frost’s “Education by Poetry” is a powerful argument for the centrality of metaphorical thinking, learned best through the study of poetry. Understanding metaphor is not just about interpreting verse; it’s about gaining the critical discernment needed to evaluate the ideas that shape our personal lives, our society, and our understanding of reality itself. It’s a call for an education that fosters not just knowledge acquisition, but the adventurous, provisional, and deeply human act of making meaning through metaphor.