“Step by step,” poet Robert Lowell observed, Frost “tested his observation of places and people until his best poems had the . . . richness of great novels.” Like an explorer, Frost gathered material by venturing out into the world, listening carefully to real conversations. “I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech,” Frost acknowledged. Each poem was an experiment in mixing different elements: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” he was fond of saying. “When I begin a poem I don’t know—I don’t want a poem that I can tell was written toward a good ending. . . . You’ve got to be the happy discoverer of your ends.”
―
Adam M. Grant,
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
