Robert Frost on Poetry

“I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.”

“The person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.”

“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.”