Poetry and Public Speech

Abstract

MOST people would concede that what is truly important is what we cannot forget even if we try. These could be events, persons, places, or words spoken or written. Unlike words most events, persons, and places tend to live on in our memories like aging photographs. We see them within the parentheses of their years, months, and days; to our regret they often have dated lives. memorable words have an undying legacy, and they survive the times and places of their origin without difficulty. How? Perhaps it is because they retain their original energy and express something that is permanently true. It is inherent in how Sophocles has Haimon answer his father Creon in Antigone after Haimon had been reprimanded for having the temerity to correct his elders. Haimon says, But if I am young and right, what dif ference does it make if I am young? Or it could be in St. Paul's Yea, though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Why have these words kept their original life? What makes them unforgettable? In a letter to the philosopher Sidney Hook, Robert Frost stresses that an essential difference exists between a grammatically correct sentence and a living sentence. He does not define the difference, but he suggests that a living sentence can be identified by its undismissable effect. I would suggest that these lines from Frost's The Death of the Hired Man would qualify as a living sentence: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in. And the same sense of life is present in the four sentences that constitute an early poem of Frost's entitled November, which concludes: