Preview

Response to Robert Frost's "Education by poetry"

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
665 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Response to Robert Frost's "Education by poetry"
In his address Education by Poetry given at Amherst College in 1930, Robert Frost introduces the two roles of poetry in education. The first role is that through poetry we cultivate our taste. The second role, which is said to be more crucial, is that poetry teaches us how to discern and understand metaphor in our life. Having read that poetry helps us with our handling metaphor, I naturally reached one simple question. Why is it important to have an ability to identify and comprehend metaphor in our life? In the next paragraph, I would like to give my answer to this very question, simultaneously demonstrating Frosts view point on the importance of the ability. Then, in the third paragraph, from my viewpoint on metaphor, I would like to go further deeper to examining the strengths and weaknesses of one metaphor.

To show why it is important to recognize metaphor in our life, the connection between metaphor and thinking on which Frost sheds fresh light in his address is the key. In general, metaphor is a word or phrase used to describe something or somebody else. More specifically, metaphor expresses one thing in terms of another, therefore creating relative values and a certain association between them. According to Frost, this conception of metaphor is the same as that of thinking. To think of one object is to explain that object in terms of another object, and so is to think of a person, an event, and so on. Hence, an amazing thought, which Frost similarly reasons, can be reasoned; metaphor binds everything in this world together. For when you think of something, you are associating it with other thing, which means creating a metaphor, and this applies to all objects, persons, and events that have been recognized in the world. In other words, we construct the world in the form of collection of metaphors. In the world full of metaphor, why can it be petty to handle metaphor well? To correctly understand relative values and kinds of associations among metaphors in

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    The Use of Metaphors

    • 3201 Words
    • 13 Pages

    A metaphor is where you show how two unrelated things are similar. For example by saying "Love is a roller-coaster.” A key aspect of a metaphor is use a specific transference of a word into another context. The human mind creates comparisons between different things. The best writers use metaphors. Like poetry, a metaphor will express a thousand different meanings all at once, allowing the writer to convey much more content than they could do otherwise. More than playing simple word games, the use of metaphors in your writing can elevate your stories to a place next to the greatest authors in the world.…

    • 3201 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Metaphor is for most people device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish--a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found,on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.…

    • 3927 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    What I found interesting while reading the text is that the authors give us examples of metaphors used in our daily language. In the metaphor "ARGUMENT…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The most interesting poetic device found in the poem was the use of extended metaphor. It is evident in lines three to ten:…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “Introduction to Poetry”, the writer Billy Collins sends out a message to all readers, implying that when reading a poem, one should be patient in finding the meaning to it and be open minded. Billy Collins uses metaphors and personification as a different way of sending out his message to the readers.…

    • 315 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The perspective of life is led by what the imagination captures. For some individuals, connecting to life can be just as difficult as a five year old trying to run a marathon. “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” (Bible, 1979). The power that shapes this expression can help anyone achieve great things or just waste one 's life altogether. That is why I think that literature found in songs, plays, stories, and poems helps all of us make a connection with life. Literature gives us a broader perspective in our imagination. The poem, "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is one of those pieces of literature that help us connect to life. This paper will explain why "The Road Not Taken" captured my attention as a reader, evaluate the poem by using the reader-response approach, and finally describe said approach.…

    • 915 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    On the contrary, metaphors are not meant to bring confusion, but are meant to identify and shape a subject, yet in the same way have the power to make things simpler. According to Metaphors We Live by, “…metaphorical concepts can be extended beyond the range of ordinary literal ways of thinking and talking into the range of what is called figurative, poetic, colorful, or fanciful thought and language” (Lackoff & Johnson 13). Therefore, metaphors become beneficial for many to give and gain more clarity about life. They become an effective tool to state things in a more desirable way as well as give uniqueness of comparing things in a better way.…

    • 981 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Frost is an important writer due to the fact that he helped renew popular interest in American poetry by refusing to write with the academic modernist style used at the time, he chose to be different. Frost wrote about nature and rural life in a traditional yet complex way that grabbed the interest of many people. Some of his best works that I particularly like include “The Road Not Taken”, “Home Burial”, and “Fire and Ice”. These poems Frost wrote helped form the conception of Americans as tough, self-sufficient individuals. “Home Burial” was about the overwhelming grief after the death of a child. Frost knew and experienced this first hand due to the loss of quite a few people. “Fire and Ice” considers the apocalyptic end of the world.…

    • 203 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Critics raved about Robert Frost in the 19th and 20th century. Additionally, there was such a sufficient amount of positive feed that it was hard to find bits of criticism. Robert Frost’s awards consist of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the United States Poet Laureate, a Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Frost was obviously a successful and gifted writer, however, even the best writers have their blemishes.…

    • 728 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analyzing the poem by discovering how the author used literary elements usually is very essential to understanding the poem's theme. As one of the significant elements, extended metaphor may convey one of key ideas in poetry. Depending on the poem, extended metaphor may provide the opportunity to reflect on even more deep and hidden, but just as important concepts the author chooses to convey. Similarly, in the poem # 371, Emily Dickinson uses extended metaphor as practically the most essential element to convey her feelings in regard to The Antique Book held as fascinating and exciting volume.…

    • 777 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Metaphorical rhetorical analysis combines a variety of components from other styles of criticism we have studied. It begins by using the Tenor (The topic being explained) and the vehicle (The mechanism through which we view the topic) to identify the metaphors found in the artifact. Much like cluster criticism, you use the metaphors to identify common themes in the artifact, as well as the rhetors terministic lens. You can then use those themes to identify ideologies within the artifact, which makes this method directly compatible with ideological criticism as well.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an object is described by comparing it to something else. For example in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace. Happy is Hermia, wheresoe'er she lies; For she hath blessed and attractive eyes.” (In lines 2-4) Shakespeare is comparing more prayer to lesser grace and happy to hermia. Shakespeare uses metaphors to allow the audience to create a better understanding of the text. It also involves the viewers in a sense, giving them a chance to relate to the…

    • 403 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Acquainted

    • 550 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Allusions were not a focal point within my poetry program, however, metaphors held major importance. When I simply mentioned the titles of the poems I chose to cut and fragment from they scream metaphor and symbolism. Roads, Acquainted, Night, Silence all drew intense imagery of my life and the paths or roads that I’ve taken (and not taken). Although this may or may not have given me a better sense of understanding of the texts, it most certainly gave me a different understanding; one that I would not have necessarily expected prior to this assignment.…

    • 550 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the poem “A Young Birch”, Robert Frost establishes the futility of existence despite having beauty through the use of symbols, structure, and imagery. Although the birch tree is beautiful, its life is meaningless and its death is unavoidable. The speaker describes the birch tree’s life, but in the end, the struggles that the birch tree faced were pointless.…

    • 810 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Robert Frost Essay

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Robert Frost’s poem The Vantage Point tells of a man who is lost in the world of people so seeks refuge in nature. A vantage point is a viewpoint from which someone is able to see a wide range of things. The vantage point in the poem is where the man goes to watch the human world while remaining separate from it. Robert Frost could relate to the man in the poem as he spent most of his life as an outcast living apart from everyone else. Since Robert Frost failed as a poet and most of other things he tried in life, he was set apart from society and found himself and comfort in nature.…

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays