“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

Variant: A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Robert Frost265

American poet 1874–1963

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“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“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 (1874–1963) American poet

Letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916)
1910s

“Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

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“The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger…”

Jericho Brown (1976) American writer

On how poems might be structured around a political theme in “JERICHO BROWN in conversation with MICHAEL DUMANIS” http://www.benningtonreview.org/jericho-brown-interview in Bennington Review (2018 Oct 27)