The esteemed poet and critic Louise Bogan (1897-1970), who reviewed poetry for the New Yorker for forty years, wrote this of the Robert Frost poem, The Pasture, “… is a love song, among other things – surely one of the loveliest in the language.”
There are more than 800 colleges in this country where it ought to be nailed to the door of the Creative Writing department, because it bears all the instruction any would-be poet needs.
The Pasture
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
Robert Frost
With this wisp of a lyric, Frost reveals the nature of the poet. He tells us that poets are people committed to the life they’ve made, which blends seamlessly with the ordinary world, which they love and make no demands upon.
The poet, too, is possessed of an ear for the music people speak. An innate generosity makes him unable to proceed alone, nor to conceal what he discovers. The poet asks no permission, begs no sanction, neither collects, nor heeds the credentials of any academy.