“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

The Second Coming (1980)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Southern philosophical novelist 1916–1990

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“He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry — it is he who is a poet.”

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