Stephen Spender tells T.S. Eliot he wants to be a poet

In 1930 T.S. Eliot had decided to publish four of his [Stephen Spender's] poems in the Criterion, and furthermore invited him to lunch.

"At our first luncheon he [T.S. Eliot] asked me what I wanted to do. I said: 'Be a poet.' 'I can understand you wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by "being a poet,"' he objected."

  --Stephen Spender, quoted in essay "Stephen Spender: A Nice Bloody Fool," by Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) in posthumous anthology Arguably