A Quote by Robert Frost

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Robert Frost

Quote Topics

Begins Delight Ends Figure How Itself Love Makes Pleasure Poem Same Should Tell Wisdom

Quote Author

Robert Frost
American - Poet
March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Robert Frost

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Robert Frost

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

Charles Baudelaire

Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

Karen Armstrong

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

May Sarton

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Randall Jarrell

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

Anne Sexton

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Maya Angelou

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Philip Schultz

[In response to Alfred Tennyson's poem "Vision of Sin," which included the line "Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born."] If this were true, the population of the world would be at a stand-still. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: "Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 [and] 1/16 is born." Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 [and] 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Charles Babbage

Poetry is poetry. My process is I try to write the best poem I can, in the best way to communicate whatever it is the poem is trying to communicate, and then I try to figure out the best way to present that poem to a live audience. It's all craft, just different stages of craft.