Meaning

Frost is making a careful and meaningful distinction between two different roles a person can play in relation to others. A teacher, as he seems to be using the word, delivers knowledge and guides students through a body of material. An awakener does something harder and less tangible: they stir something already present inside the other person, some curiosity, some awareness, some deeper engagement with life. The implication is that the most valuable thing one person can give another is not information but a kind of activation.

Context

Frost spent a significant portion of his life teaching and lecturing at universities and colleges, even as he resisted being categorized primarily as an academic figure. This remark reflects the tension he seems to have felt between formal instruction and the more elusive quality he believed great poetry and great conversation could produce in a listener or reader. It is consistent with his broader belief that poetry should be a living experience that changes how a person feels and thinks, not merely a subject to be studied.

About the author

Robert Frost was an American poet born in 1874 and died in 1963. He spent much of his adult life in New England, and the region's landscapes became the backdrop for some of the most recognizable poems in the American canon. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on four separate occasions and became a widely admired public figure later in life. Though his work often appears simple and conversational on the surface, it consistently rewards close reading with layers of irony, sorrow, and philosophical questioning.