“Their common assumption [communists and left-wing poets] is that every one must stand somewhere politically - and especially the poets, who are under suspicion as unpractical people who shirk the responsibility of taking a stand.”

nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/world/europe/joachim-gaucks-background-seen-as-an-asset-in-germany.html

West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…

On the poet having both responsibility and freedom in “Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera” https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/current-issue-4/features/interview-with-juan-felipe-herrera/ (Gulf Stream, 2015)

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

Source: The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), On Algernon Charles Swinburne Ch. III: The Great Victorian Poets (p. 95)

Paris From My Window (1944)