What one finds upon reading [Frost's] Collected Poems is a relatively small number of first-rate pieces and a much larger number of unsuccessful ones. I don't mean the failures are "bad poems"; a few are, but scores and scores of them are poems that almost make it—almost but not quite. Usually they contain fine descriptions, pointed imagery, apt and characteristic language; but then at some point they turn talky, insistent, too literal, as if Frost were trying to coerce the meaning from his own poetic materials. And in fact I think this is exactly what he was trying to do. Call it vanity, arrogance, or whatever: Frost came to distrust his own imagination, and believed he could make his poems do and say what he wanted them to do and say. His best poems, nearly all of them from his first two or three books, were poems in which meaning and feeling had come together spontaneously in their own figures and objects. They were esthetically functional creations in the fullest sense. Frost saw that this had happened, and presumably he wanted to make it keep happening, but he ended by coercing his poems in formulaic and predictable ways. He ended not with poems but with editorials. (pp. 37-8)
["Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"] is not Frost's best poem…. But it is a good poem, to my mind quite genuine, and its meanings and feelings, larger than any stated in the poem, do emerge indirectly but unmistakably from the arrangements of images, rhythms, sounds, and syntax; we all know this, and Frost knew it too. The story is told that he wrote the poem at dawn in a state of near-exhaustion, after working all night on a longer poem that wasn't going well. He wrote it easily and quickly. And it turned out to say more than he knew he was saying, which is just the experience that all of us who write poems recognize and long for. Frost longed for it too. He longed to repeat it. But his longing drove him to attempt the coercion of the experience by means of contrivance and conscious control. (p. 38)
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