How to Use poetic license in a Sentence

poetic license

noun
  • Of course, train robbery is such a familiar term that perhaps there is poetic license.
    — WSJ, 1 Feb. 2022
  • What seemed like poetic license used to make a point now seems steeped in elements of reality.
    — Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic, 24 Oct. 2020
  • So the poetic license on the songs on this record was really, really limited.
    — Melinda Newman, Billboard, 15 Sep. 2022
  • Basically this is a Texas history book dressed up with poetic license in the form of a novel.
    — Andrew Dansby, ExpressNews.com, 31 May 2020
  • In the episode, Rufus refers to the play without saying its name, as a way to critique Miller’s poetic license.
    — Rachel Kaufman, Smithsonian, 9 Apr. 2018
  • Of course, that's a bit of poetic license; Kirk is, after all, a fictional character.
    — Don Lincoln, CNN, 12 Oct. 2021
  • There’s a winged Statue of Liberty, but that’s just poetic license.
    — Pat Beall, Sun Sentinel, 24 Apr. 2026
  • The Hannity's defenders may call that sarcasm or poetic license, but words are words.
    — Fox News, 9 June 2018
  • This suggests that McLain might have taken poetic license with some of the details of Gellhorn’s life.
    — Wayne Catan, idahostatesman, 11 May 2018
  • However, the victim inevitably would have died from shock and blood loss very early on in the process, so the final fluttering of the lungs is likely poetic license.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 10 Jan. 2022
  • Where, then, does reality stop and poetic license begin in a film that includes many private conversations?
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 18 Dec. 2022
  • But this is a bit of poetic license — because a stationary observer on the Moon actually would never see the Earth rising or setting.
    — Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 19 Dec. 2015
  • What abides is a giddy awareness of history as a tale told by unreliable narrators, as well as the oddly comforting impression that senescence has its own poetic license.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 24 Apr. 2018
  • To put a life, or an act of creation, on-screen means speaking in movie language, always its own kind of poetic license to begin with; to put a life of music on the screen invites even more hyperbole and exaggeration.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 12 Aug. 2021
  • Suddenly, what was originally just an ethereal touch of poetic license becomes an extended flight of surrealism.
    — Washington Post, 18 June 2021
  • The version of events painted on three walls of the 52-square-meter funerary chambers probably takes some poetic license with Capitolias' history.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 10 Oct. 2018
  • The production, directed by Neel Keller, carefully splits the difference between documentary objectivity and poetic license.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 18 Jan. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'poetic license.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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