W.S. Merwin on advice he received from Ezra Pound:

He said if you want to be a poet you have to take it seriously. You have to work on it the way you would work on anything else and you have to do it every day. He said you should write about 75 lines every day. You know, Pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything. And he said, you don't really have anything to write about 75 lines about a day. He said you don't really have anything to write about. He said, at the age of 18, you think you do but you don't. And he said the way to do it is to learn a language and translate. He said, that way, you can practice and you can find out what you can do with your language, with your language. You can learn a foreign language but the translation is your way of learning your own language.

From an interview, here.