Introduction by Robert Frost

Maturity is no object except perhaps in education where you
might think from all the talk the aim and end of everything
was to get sophisticated before educated. Shakespeare says it
is the right virtue of the medlar to be rotten before it is ripe.
Overdevelop the social conscience and make us all social
meddlers. But I digress before I begin. My theme is not edu-
cation, but poetry and how young one has to be or stay to
make it. And it is not schools in general I reflect on, only bad
schools which something should be done about before they
get much larger. My excuse is that school and poetry come
so near being one thing. Poetry has been a great concern of
school all down the ages. A large part of reading in school
always has been and still is poetry; and it is but an extension
from the metaphors of poetry out into all thinking, scientific
and philosophic. In fact the poet and scholar have so much
in common and live together so naturally that it is easy to
make too much of a mystery about where they part company.
Their material seems the same -- perhaps differs a little in
being differently come by and differently held in play. Thor-
oughness is the danger of the scholar, dredging to the dregs.
He works on assignment and self-assignment with some sense
of the value of what he is getting when he is getting it. He is
perhaps too avid of knowledge. The poet's instinct is to shun
or shed more knowledge than he can swing or sing. His most

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