Meaning

Frost is saying that genuine emotion in the writer is the necessary starting point for genuine emotion in the reader. If the person creating a piece of writing does not feel something real while making it, the finished work will leave its audience cold. The writer's authentic experience of surprise, grief, joy, or wonder is what gets transferred onto the page and then into another person's heart.

Context

Frost wrote this line in his preface to a collection of his poems, a short essay in which he tried to explain how a poem comes to life. He argued that a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but that the whole journey must be felt genuinely by the poet first. The essay is one of the most quoted pieces of practical advice in American literary criticism, valued because it cuts through theory and speaks directly to the creative act itself.

About the author

Robert Frost was one of the most celebrated American poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1874, he spent much of his life in New England, and its landscapes, seasons, and rural characters shaped the world of his verse. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, a record at the time, and he became a beloved public figure, reading a poem at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. He died in 1963.