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Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. they never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by god. they never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. they waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...they wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.
-Thomas Merton
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Many Poets Are Not Poets For The

Thomas Merton
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. they never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by god. they never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. they waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...they wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.
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Religious Writing Artist

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One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. the good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. a good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.
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Saint augustine cries, lord i cannot love you, but come in and love yourself in me. according to saint paul, we must put off our own natural form and put on the form of god, and saint augustine tells us to discard our own mode of nature; then the divine nature will flow in and be revealed. saint augustine says, those who seek and find, find not. he who seeks and finds not, he alone finds. saint paul says, what i was, was not i, it was god in me.
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It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. all i can say is that i have always written poems. i don't think i'm interested in any discussion about whether i'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. but i am sure, i want to write great poems. i think every poet should want that.
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The ideas of primary qualities of bodies, are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas, produced in us by these secondary qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. there is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. they are in bodies, we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us: and what is sweet, blue or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so.
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If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. i've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as i think all of these poems are. it seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.
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Those may justly be reckoned void of understanding that do not bless and praise god; nor do men ever rightly use their reason till they begin to be religious, nor live as men till they live to the glory of god. as reason is the substratum or subject of religion (so that creatures which have no reason are not capable of religion), so religion is the crown and glory of reason, and we have our reason in vain, and shall one day wish we had never had it, if we do not glorify god with it.
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