Poetry and ‘a continual extinction of personality’ 

Poetry, like other arts, produces a unique joy through an artistic creation of beauty. To such artistic creation each great poet  brings a freshness and individuality that give the poems an original place in world poetry. Poets differ in their moods; spring is “the cruelest month” for T.S. Eliot. On the contrary April is energetic and cheerful for Chaucer in Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. But it may be remembered that a poet should write without interruption from the intrusion of his personal peculiarities. Arnold calls the artist “most fortunate, when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself.” “The progress of an artist is a continual extinction of personality” (T.S. Eliot).

                If the poets follow T.S. Eliot’s dictum, and keep their personality away during the moments of composing the poems, they may well become the idols of intellectuals; some might become immortal like Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens. Who can forget the poems of Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Babette Deutsch, Richard Eberhart, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur.

 The mysticism of these American poets’ inspiration and symbolism of their vision is extraordinary. The poets like Bob Dylan, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel, Richard Farina and others have put English poetry on a new strength and beauty, due to “a continual extinction of personality”.