"Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward"
About this Quote
Frost is smuggling an ego-check into a definition of craft. Style, for him, isn’t decorative icing or a signature flourish you tack onto meaning; it’s a visible readout of posture. “How the writer takes himself” is the tell: swagger, self-protection, sincerity, hauteur. You can hear Frost’s New England suspicion of grandiosity in the implication that tone is a moral fact. The sentence quietly asks: are you speaking as someone who believes his own myth, or someone who knows language can’t cash all the checks a big feeling writes?
Then he pivots to a kinetic image that makes the abstraction stick. “The mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward” captures what good prose and poetry actually feel like: progress that looks like digression. The writer advances through recursion - revising, qualifying, echoing, worrying a phrase until it yields. The circles aren’t failure; they’re traction. Skaters don’t go straight because the body needs arcs to generate speed and balance. Frost frames style as controlled self-rotation: a consciousness aware of its own moves, turning self-scrutiny into momentum rather than paralysis.
Context matters. Frost built his reputation on poems that sound plainspoken while being formally cunning. He’s defending the art in the “natural” voice: the line that seems effortless but is engineered by a mind constantly looping back, checking itself, keeping its blades sharp. The subtext is a warning to writers chasing “voice” as branding: style is not a costume. It’s how your thinking shows its work.
Then he pivots to a kinetic image that makes the abstraction stick. “The mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward” captures what good prose and poetry actually feel like: progress that looks like digression. The writer advances through recursion - revising, qualifying, echoing, worrying a phrase until it yields. The circles aren’t failure; they’re traction. Skaters don’t go straight because the body needs arcs to generate speed and balance. Frost frames style as controlled self-rotation: a consciousness aware of its own moves, turning self-scrutiny into momentum rather than paralysis.
Context matters. Frost built his reputation on poems that sound plainspoken while being formally cunning. He’s defending the art in the “natural” voice: the line that seems effortless but is engineered by a mind constantly looping back, checking itself, keeping its blades sharp. The subtext is a warning to writers chasing “voice” as branding: style is not a costume. It’s how your thinking shows its work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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