You motivated me to look up the Frost interview which is quite good & amusing, in a way, in the number of different ways Frost comes at the same point. The interviewer begins by reminding him of how he once said that a poem needs "dramatic accent," & Frost says, yeah, it has to be "catchy" (lines from Shakespeare "stick to you like burrs thrown on you in holiday foolery. You don't have to try to remember them.") Then, it has to have "expression." ("It ought to fight being set to music if it's got expression in it.") Then, it needs "meaning" (which is what makes a poet "act up" in the part you quoted). Then, "mood," in connection with which he says:
"Somebody said to be a master writer you don't have to wait for your moods. That'd be like Browning as he got older. You get to be a virtuoso, and you aren't a poet any more. He'd lost his moods somewhere. He'd got to be a master. We don't want to be masters."
Then, a poem is "a little voyage of discovery" or, more concisely, a "dawn" -- the unpremeditated, uncontrived element. Finally, it needs "fresh observation."
You could probably elaborate any of these approaches into a philosophy of poetry, or an attempt to articulate the essential "thing" that brings a poem to life & justifies its existence. Not just individually, but generically, insofar as every successful poem justifies poetry as a unique & indispensable form of discourse.
You say: "we're talking about technique that goes beyond technique, measure that goes beyond measure."
Technique as such is mechanical & could be simulated. The "beyond" dimension is specifically human. Think of the compelling sci-fi mythology of the difficulty of differentiating sophisticated robots from people: the subversive subtext being, are we not robots ourselves? How do we know we're not? How do you tell a real poem from a "mechanical and contrived" sonnet exercise? Same kind of distinction.
Perhaps there is a basic difference in motivation. A good poem derives from a motivation to say something, a bad poem from a motivation to "be a poem," to simulate the condition of a real poem. A good poem uses the means of poetry to its own meaningful ends; a bad poem makes the poetical means ends in themselves, sort of fetishes. The "dramatic voice" would be the sense that the poetical means are being subordinated to the speaker's ends. The speaker is not trying to be a poet; he's trying to say something, using poetry as the best available means.
Something like that, maybe.
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