"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
“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."”
Lecture, "The Themes of Robert Frost" (1947)
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Robert Penn Warren 49
American poet, novelist, and literary critic 1905–1989Related quotes

Variant translation:
Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry!
"Zen Poetics of Ryokan" in Simply Haiku: A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry (Summer 2006) http://www.hermitary.com/articles/ryokan_poetics.html
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf : Zen Poems of Ryokan (1993)

“The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.”
Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)
Quote from a 1962 essay by Andre; as quoted in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015

West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

“I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”

The Poetic Principle (1850)
“…whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.”
“Recent Poetry”, p. 227
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)
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