[...] I expect that by now you will have grown more familiar with Feuerbach. You should probably have begun with his essay on death and immortality. But you will soon find what is right. It’s bad enough having to read books in order to become a natural man! All the harm which lies in this lies, in turn, in the books themselves. In order to express the most basic truth, the writer must write God knows how much, and what’s worse, he becomes in the process not a human being but merely a writer once more. But Feuerbach ends up by becoming a human being, and on this point he is so weighty an authority, particularly in relation to absolute philosophy in which the human being is completely subsumed by the philosopher. Nowhere have I found the natural healthy process so clearly and so consciously expressed as by Feuerbach, and I confess that I am greatly indebted to him: the same thing will presumably happen to you, too.
You have misunderstood the point of the comparison between the poet and the thaumaturge. The poet’s nature finds expression not only in his more immediate verse-making, seen from a practical point of view, but in the whole way in which he acts and views things, a process in which he must, however, exercise a certain self-restraint if he is to submit himself to it, i.e. act and view things as, for ex., the practical necessity of modern life demands. A modern poet may be forced by sheer necessity into becoming a merchant, a carpet-knight, a citizen of the realm etc., but only to the extent that he violates his own true nature.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 97