“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 43.
Source: The Adventures of Huck Finn
Context: So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and aint't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

On his seventieth birthday (1926); as quoted in The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling
1920s

In My Dreams

Bohemian San Francisco, Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes—The Elegant Art of Dining http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9464/pg9464.html, 1914, by Clarence E. Edwords
1810s

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)
Context: I hear him, before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that's been.
I realise he's there,
When I turn the light off and turn over.

As quoted in The Power of Respect : Benefit from the Most Forgotten Element of Success (2009) by Deborah Norville, p. 65

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the right to adore him already.