The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.” – Robert Penn Warren, “The Themes of Robert Frost,” Hopwood Lecture, 1947
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mugs game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. – T. S. Eliot
