“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

—  Robert Frost

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "To be a poet is a condition, not a profession." by Robert Frost?
Robert Frost photo
Robert Frost 265
American poet 1874–1963

Related quotes

Robert Graves photo

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Reply to questionnaire, "The Cost of Letters" in Horizon (September 1946).
General sources

Joseph Campbell photo
David Hume photo

“At present they [philosophers] seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus.”

For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?
Part 4, Section 3
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Charles Baudelaire photo

“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables: le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer. Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l'écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des professions.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

Gerard Manley Hopkins photo

“Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Letter to Coventry Patmore, published in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (1955), edited by C. C. Abbott, p. 263
Letters, etc

Derek Walcott photo

“Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176

Aubrey Beardsley photo
Albert Barnes photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

Related topics