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They seem not capable of the over-and-above stuff. I do believe maybe it goes on in their heads they are incapable of catching it as they read but. They truly are too directly intent from the reading. They cant get started looking two ways at a time. I believe too these are typically scared of the simplicity of several things they think in the side as they read. They wouldn’t have the facial skin to get in touch it written down utilizing the great author they have now been reading. It could be a childhood memory; it may be some homely simile; it may be a line or verse of mother goose. They want it to be big and bookish. Nonetheless they haven’t books enough in their heads to fit book stuff with book stuff. Of course a few of that would be all right.

Indeed, in lots of ways Frost’s advice on essay-writing is truly suggestions about reading — that mutuality of thought between reader and writer, pulsed through by the book as “a heart that only beats in the chest of another.” Echoing Virginia Woolf’s dictum on how best to read a written book, Frost offers counsel so passionate that it becomes almost a stream-of-consciousness prose poem, barely punctuated:

The game is matching your author thought for thought in just about any of many ways that are possible. Reading then becomes converse — give and take. It is only conversation where the reader takes part addressing himself to some thing in the author in the subject material or form. Just like whenever we talk together! Being careful to hold our end up and also to do our part agreeably without way too much contradiction and mere opinionation. The most sensible thing of all is going each other one better mounting up the ideas anecdotes and incidents like alternating hands piled up regarding the knee. Well its out of conversation such as this with a book yours perhaps the book’s that will serve for other lesser ideas to center around that you find perhaps one idea perhaps. And there’s your essay.

He lands from this poetic elation into some practical advice:

Be brief at first. You should be honest. You don’t want to create your material seem a lot more than it is. You won’t have so much to state in the beginning while you shall have later. My defect is in without having learned to hammer my material into one lump. I haven’t had experience enough. The information of essay won’t come in right they will in narrative for me as. Sometimes I have gotten round the difficulty by some dodge that is narrative.

Take it easy with the essay whatever you do. Write it as well if you have to write it as you can. Be as concrete as the statutory law allows inside it — concrete and experiential. Don’t let it scare you. Don’t strain. Keep in mind that any old thing that takes place in your mind as you read will be the thing you prefer. If nothing much seems to happen, perhaps another reading shall help. Possibly the book is bad or perhaps is not your kind — is absolutely nothing to you and can start nothing in your nature some way.

He interjects a meta-remark from the nature naturalness and — of this essay form:

Needless to say this letter is essay. It is material which has started to the top of my mind in reading just as frost brings stones to your surface for the ground.

In the very end, before signing off “Affectionately Papa,” Frost can’t resist taking just a little jab during the essay, voicing the sentiment that seems to explain his or her own lifelong resistance to partaking into the genre:

I don’t know you know whether its worth very that is much mean the essay — when you’ve got it written. I’m rather afraid of it as an enemy towards the writing that is really creative holds scenes and things within the eye voices in the ear and whole situations as a kind of plexus in the human body (I don’t know just where).

Lesley was raised to be an author herself, albeit not of essays — she published two books of stories for kids: Really Not Really in 1962, published mere months before her father’s death, and Digging right down to China in 1968.

The Letters of Robert Frost is a trove of writerly wisdom and heartwarming parental advice to the poet’s six children, of whom Lesley and her sister Irma outlived their father in its portly 850-page totality. Complement it with Frost’s beautiful poem on art and government, which he meant to but didn’t read at JFK’s inauguration, and F. Scott Fitzgerald regarding the secret of great writing in a letter of advice to his or her own daughter, then revisit this growing library of writers’ advice on writing.

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