One ought always to play to one’s audience.

“This is not the grousing of a verse-writer; publishers are generous to verse, apparently because it looks well in the catalogue, and it gets a good deal of space in reviews, apparently because people who don’t read poetry still like talk about poetry, and there are always corners needing to be filled in the magazines. But of the people I come across and like, I doubt if anybody reads much modern verse who doesn’t write it. You could pick out in Conquistador a series of authors who had been borrowed from and used, and I felt rather critical about this at first, but of course if you have a public to write for it is an excellent thing to use the existing tools (compare the Elizabethans). The English poet of any merit takes, I think, a much more clinical view of his own products. The first or only certain reason for writing verse is to clear your own mind and fix your own feelings, and for this purpose it would be stupid to borrow from people, and for this purpose you want to be as concentrated as possible. Mr. Eliot said somewhere that a poet ought to practice his art at least once a week, and some years ago I was able to ask the oracle whether he thought this really necessary, a question on which much seemed to hang. After brooding and avoiding traffic for a while he answered with the full weight of his impressiveness, and I am sure without irony, that he had been thinking of someone else when he wrote that, and in such a case as my own the great effort of the poet must be to write as little as possible.” —William Empson