“The poet should be responsible to the poem.”
The Poet's Poetic Responsibility (2012)
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Ataol Behramoğlu 18
Turkish writer 1942Related quotes
“…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)

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

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

Dedication 'You and I' Macmillan, New York October 1914
Other Quotes

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)

"The Deserters: The Contemporary Defeat of Fiction" (1972)
“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.