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How did Robert Frost use translation to explain a quality that may be lost in poetry?
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Poetry
Poems hanging from an outdoor poetry line during the annual International Festival of Poetry in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada.
American poet Robert Frost famously remarked that poetry is what gets left behind in translation. By this, he suggested a criterion of scientific refinement: when one is in doubt about whether a piece of writing is poetry or prose, it should be translated. According to Frost’s logic, whatever survives the translation process is prose, while the remainder—the essential quality that cannot be transferred—is poetry.12