Don't write poetry for money-or plan on it for a career-that was the advice Robert Frost gave to students when the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet spent three days at the University of Buffalo in 1927 as poet in residence. Novels, essays or other literary forms might be written that way but poetry is too uncertain, the poet said.

Frost, whose visit was made possible by the Fenton Foundation, gave two public readings and spent a great deal of time looking at the works of students, offering "constructive criticism," according to The Buffalo Bee, an early predecessor to The Spectrum.

A poem, Frost said, is written because people can't help writing it and written first for the poet himself. If it's published at all, it is not for the public but for the few who will appreciate it. The trouble with some poets, Frost told The Bee, is that they publish too many poems and often bury their best work in the rubbish they write.

More advice to University of Buffalo students from Frost:

"Poetry should come when the mood comes," he said, adding that he disliked having his publishers hound him for more poems. "I like to keep my poems for about a year to see if the mood is a permanent one or just a passing one," Frost said. If it turns out that it's a passing mood and "not true," Frost confided, he destroys the poem.