Flashes of Creative Intuition: The Unrecognized Aphorisms of Robert Frost

Abstract

The aphorism—defined as a concise statement of a truth or opinion, and seen by literary theorists as a fragment of thought which springs into the mind as an unexpected flash of intuition—is studied as a genre in Europe, but largely ignored in the U.S. As a result, the aphorisms scattered through the notebooks of Robert Frost, as transcribed by Robert Faggen, interest scholars only as they provide insight into Frost’s poetry. Instead, this extraordinary body of work of over a thousand aphorisms shows that Frost should be regarded as a great aphorist as well as a great poet.