Montaigne, writing in his essay Of Presumption:

For in truth, as regards any kind of products of the mind, I have never brought forth anything that satisfied me; and the approbation of others does not repay me.  My taste is delicate and hard to please, and especially regarding myself; I am incessantly disowning myself; and I feel myself, in every part, floating and bending with weakness.  I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment.  My sight is clear and controlled enough; but when I put it to work, it grows blurred, as I find most evidently in poetry.  I love it infinitely; I am a pretty good judge of other men’s works; but in truth, I play the child when I try to set my hand to it; I cannot endure myself.  A man may play the fool anywhere else, but not in poetry:

For Gods and men and booksellers refuse
To countenance a mediocre Muse.

                                  HORACE

Would God that maxim were written on the front of all our printers’ shops, to deny entrance to so many versifiers:

No man has more assurance than a bad poet.

                                 MARTIAL

Why have we no such nations as these?  Dionysius the Elder esteemed nothing of his own so highly as his poetry.  At the time of the Olympic games, with chariots surpassing all others in magnificence, he also sent poets and musicians to present his verses, with royally gilded and tapestried tents and pavilions.  When they came to deliver his verses, the grace and excellence of the pronunciation at first drew the attention of the people; but when later they came to ponder the ineptitude of the work, they first grew scornful, and, becoming more and more bitter in their judgment, they presently flew into a fury, and ran to all his pavilions and knocked them down and tore them to bits in resentment.  And when his chariots did not make any kind of a showing in the races either, and the ship bringing his men back missed Sicily and was driven and shattered by the tempest against the coast of Tarentum, the people felt certain that it was the wrath of the gods, irritated, like themselves, against this bad poem.  And even the sailors who escaped from the shipwreck seconded this opinion of the people.

The oracle that predicted his death also seemed to subscribe to this somewhat.  It said that Dionysius would be near his end when he had vanquished men better than himself; which he took to mean the Carthaginians, who surpassed him in power.  And in fighting them he often sidestepped victory and tempered it so as not to incur the fate predicted.  But he misunderstood it; for the god was referring to the time he gained the award at Athens over better tragic poets than he, by favor and injustice, presenting in the competition his play entitled The Leneians; after which victory he suddenly died, partly of the excessive joy that he got from it.

[trans. Donald M. Frame]