"If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible. […] If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

But for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish […].

[…] I do not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement; I complain that we seem not even to entertain the desire."

from Poetry and Ambition by Donald Hall.