… Many of those who seek help in workshops in order get published have a dream, I think, not so much of devoting the most intense part of their lives to the hard, lonely. Glorious, transcendent work-play of writing poetry, but of appearing before the world as a poet. It is a dream of individual freedom, an unexamined, perhaps even unconscious need in a country where even the individualizing first name of a human being has been reduced to the uniformed and meaningless: "My name is Jean; I am your waitress for the evening." It does not in any way resemble the hippie rebellion in which youth divided itself from age by dressing alike, acting, talking, wearing their hair, eating, living alike. The point of this dream is the expression of freedom and uniqueness of a self. Need I say that, though some few professional poets have felt free to express outwardly their quirky selfness, it is the strong inner sense of self, usually protected from the public eye, saved from and dedicated to the poems, that is characteristic of most successful publishing poets/ Most of them are happy to be indistinguishable in public, leading quiet, domestic lives. The private aspects of the wild and the unique are saved for the poems. Iconoclasm is saved, hoarded, for language – for forms on the page.

-Mona Van Duyn, "Matters of Poetry"
[via Fort of Sand]