Meaning

Frost is describing the obscure, pre-verbal feeling that a poem starts from, before the words exist. It is not a clear idea or a subject chosen deliberately but something more physical and emotional: a tightness, a longing, a sense that something is not right with the world or with the self. The poem is then the effort to find language for that feeling and, in doing so, to partially resolve it.

Context

Frost wrote this in a private letter to the poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, with whom he maintained a long and candid correspondence over many years. Because it was a letter rather than a published essay, the thought has an unguarded, searching quality that makes it feel particularly honest. It has since become one of the most widely quoted descriptions of how creative work actually begins, valued by writers and readers alike for naming something that is usually hard to put into words.

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 working life in New England, and that region's landscapes and human textures shaped his verse throughout his career. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times and was widely regarded as a defining voice of American literature. His correspondence with other writers and thinkers, including Louis Untermeyer, is considered an important part of his literary legacy. He died in 1963.