Robert Frost: Teaching and the Pleasure of Ulteriority

Abstract

ROBERT FROST was a teacher as well as a poet, and a genius of teacherly aphorisms. ‘A word about recognition’, he warmed up a recent student about how poetry should work: ‘It is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize’.1 This is his canny power. Hospitality to readers welcomes those who may have shied away from poetry as esoterica which professorial hierophants wring into hidden meanings. ‘Every poem of his, he said, was based on an actual experience.’2 ‘Based on’ is the place to begin, then to play with. Frost’s poetry mirrors something we may know, might know, might think along with, play along with. Just as typically, Frost has something in the wings, waiting for a call to the stage, ulterior. ‘Ulteriority’ is not a word in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, and it gains only one entry, from the eighteenth century, in the OED. Frost liked the branding of the adjective into a substantive poetic method: ‘the pleasure of ulteriority’ is ‘saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another’. This is ‘metaphor’, he says, what ‘poetry is made’ of; but the first phrasing is also a fair enough definition of irony.3 Frost’s literary pleasure blends irony and metaphor, casting evident meaning into slant meaning. It takes ‘literary appreciation’ to ‘perceive that an ulterior meaning had been included in the particular meaning’, he lectured in 1953.4