Robert Penn Warren

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

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

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