On starting off in poetry (as quoted in the book “Race and the Modern Artist” https://books.google.com/books?id=4XY8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq)
“He was a great poet" They lamented.
No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?”
Source: The Kestrel
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Lloyd Alexander 93
American children's writer 1924–2007Related quotes
January Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

“A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet”

“The poet…is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.”
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: The poet... is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.

H. G. Atkins, in Edgar Prestage (ed.) Chivalry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928) pp. 99-100.
Praise
“The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not.”
Paris Review interview (1986)
Context: I always had this feeling — I’ve heard other Jews say — that when you can’t find any other explanation for Jews, you say, “Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme running all through my stuff from the very beginning. The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker. Well, the Jews began their career of troublemaking by inventing the God whom Wallace Stevens considers the ultimate poetic idea. And so I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive — you have to at least pretend that you are “seriously” in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all. You are outside observing it.