“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” — Robert Frost | V2Melody

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”

Using a sporting image to stress the value of formal constraint in poetry · Conversation / lecture remark, as commonly attributed

Art
Poetry

About Robert Frost

Robert Frost

26 March 1874–29 January 1963

Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political…

More by Robert Frost

Poems by Robert Frost

More remarks by Robert Frost

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

Describing poetry as a movement from spontaneous pleasure towards fuller understanding · Essay, The Figure a Poem Makes

“You've been broadened and enlarged to where you can listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

Defining education partly as the confidence and self-command required to hear challenging ideas · Commencement address, Dartmouth College, 1955

“There are a lot of good things I believe in, but for the life of me I can't always enumerate them at a moment's notice.”

A characteristically wry admission that deeply held convictions need not form a tidy creed · Letter to Alfred Harcourt, 1917