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

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 504)

Squares and Oblongs, in Poets at Work (1948), p. 170

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

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.

Addendum for C
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 93.
Context: A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

Odes, Book iv, Ode 9, reported in William Warburton, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq (1751) p. 31.

Source: The Kestrel

he is continually informing — and filling some other body.
Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)