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A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

— Robert Frost

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Poetry

More quotes by Robert Frost

Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.

Preface to A Way Out: A One-act Play (1929)

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.

In the Clearing (1962)

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

North of Boston (1914)

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Frost (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.