When a poet is being a poet -- that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing -- he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself. As Robert Frost put it, "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows."

There are many callings in which the need for an exclusive concern for the thing itself is obvious. If a shoemaker were making me a pair of shoes, I would not want him to think as he worked of his social role or of his reputation; I'd want him to stick to his task. If I ever had to go under the surgeons' knife, I would want the surgeon to think only of surgery.

And yet, of course, poetry is a deeply social thing -- radically and incorrigibly social. It is only the obliquity, the indirectness of its sociality that make it seem otherwise. It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product. Because he must shield his poetry in its creation, the poet, more than other writers, will write without recognition. And because his product is not in great demand, he is likely to look on honors and distinctions with the feigned indifference of the wallflower. Yet of course he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing -- like a shoe.