Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another

 --- Robert Frost, quoted by Todd R Nelson in The day I heard poetry call, CS Monitor, April 2019, republished May 2026

In context from Todd Nelson's piece:

I began to understand that a poet is describing the world, experience, or concepts in a way that antidotes dullness, commonness, and indifference; that stretches the possibilities of language; that sings and beckons. A poem is a discrete vessel of clarity and understanding. “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,” Robert Frost explained. And poems of all eras live in a kind of simultaneity in their anthologized universes.

According to LibQuotes, the Frost quote is from "Education by Poetry", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates' Quarterly (February 1931).

LibQuotes excerpt:

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.