On Robert Frost

In researching for an essay on Robert Frost and Walt Whitman's poems I found this article Robert Frost On Writing. Part dealt with how Robert Frost used tones and every day speech in his poems. I have been interested in the way we we speak and intonation lately by listening to people communicating. Here are some quotes:

'A proper understanding of intonation, the sense of the speaking voice, opened up to Frost endless possibilities for poetic effects. At the furthest extreme, intonation alone could carry meaning, quite divorced from particular words. Frost was fond of citing the example of listening to the rise and fall of voices behind closed doors or just out of earshot, where individual words could not be discerned, yet meaning, emotion, and dramatic interaction could all be intuited. Similarly, he had a Celtic delight in listening to the limited vocabulary of hearty curses and the infinite variety of meanings they could convey, depending solely "on the tones of saying it and the situations." But intonations conveyed most when they occurred most naturally, as interdependent with the actual words, when the voice itself could add connotative to denotative meaning.' 

I too like to listen to people taking just out of clear hearing distance.  And this is what I myself was trying to say a couple of posts ago.

"Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills! ' - 'Oh Anything! ' That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surprise, the 'oh' of doubt - and there are many more." 

I liked this quote especially (the emphasis is mine).

 'Art consists not in creating new variations (for that would place the artist outside nature) but in listening for tones that have not been stereotyped by literary expression, in collecting and arranging. Appreciation rests in recognition, not discovery.'

 One of my favorite poems of Frost's is Nothing Gold Can Stay:

My brother, Peter, took the photo of the sunset at a beach near us.