Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

Reflections on Wallace Stevens, p. 127, originally in Partisan Review, Vol. 18, (May/June 1951) - Poetry and the Age (1953)