Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets — and, in a better world, it may be; but in… - Randall Jarrell

Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...