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
“…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)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman

National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.
“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
Source: Nothing Twice: Selected Poems

“The distinction between a major and minor poet is the ability to write a long poem successfully.”
Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.”
“Is It Possible to Write a Poem?,” p. 111
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Is It Possible to Write a Poem”

Personism: A Manifesto, from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1972).

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 388.