Men expect too much, do too little.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.