The provocative title is not supposed to question the significance of poetry in the works of Aleksander Wat, but to suggest the singularity of his writing. Now a valued author of poetry, Wat only late recognised his poetry as his most important achievement. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the declaration of being a poet, which he made in his last years, has an other side to it, namely the feeling of a non-fulfilment as a writer, which in the biography of the author of Mediterranean Poems did not come to light with incurable pain disease but sooner, due to a failed attempt to return to the original literary activity that Wat took up after returning to Poland in 1946.