“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.”

— Robert Frost

General sources
Source: "The Poetry of Amy Lowell" in The Christian Science Monitor (16 May 1925)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Jan. 5, 2022. History

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Robert Frost 265

American poet 1874–1963

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“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.”

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“How are his poems?"
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Source: Hollywood

“If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

English note by the hand of the poet in the same paper sheet: Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Ibid., p. 229
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Se um homem escreve bem só quando está bêbado dir-lhe-ei: embebede-se- E se ele me disser que o seu fígado sofre com isso, respondo: o que é o seu fígado? É uma coisa morta que vive enquanto você vive, e os poemas que escrever vivem sem enquanto.

“You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.”

Nicholson Baker book The Anthologist

Source: The Anthologist

“The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.”

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“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
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Source: Nothing Twice: Selected Poems

“All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,—whose speech is Song.”

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“When did an old white guy yelling at me, telling me what to think become news? What gives him the right to tell me what to think? When was the last time he was in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sri Lanka… or anywhere that didn't have a beach?”

Lisa Ling (1973) American journalist, television presenter, and author

Syracuse University speech, April 19, 2006. http://blogs.mediavillage.com/tv_maven/archives/2006/04/lisa_ling_on_th.html

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

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