• The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

    Jacques Maritain: The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
    Quoted in Robert Fitzgerald (ed) Enlarging the Change (1985).