10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Robert Penn Warren

“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”

“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

“If anybody’s going to be a writer, he’s got to be able to say, “This has got to come first, to write has to come first.” That is, if you have a job, you have to scant your job a little bit. You can’t be an industrious apprentice if you’re going to be a poet. You’ve got to pretend to be an industrious apprentice but really steal time from the boss. Or from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time’s got to come from somewhere. And also this passivity, this “waitingness,” has to be achieved some way. It can’t be treated as a job. It’s got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job.”

“The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.”

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.””

“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”

“You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It’s more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.”

“The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.”

—Robert Penn Warren