An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance. - Richard Hugo

Mr. Auden believed that the fear of failure is the nemesis of American writers. We are so competitive, he says, that want to destroy all other writers, want to write the one book that is so great tit will eliminate all competition forever. Since the imagination cannot cope with such a task, the result is creative impotency. When I meet a poet who is jealous of the poems of others (reputation is another matter), I'm sure that poet has not yet written a poem as good as he knows he can. When you have done your best, it doesn't matter how good it is. That is for others to say. An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance. I believe Williams discover that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one's life as valid. What a silly thing we do. We sweat through prom after poem to realize what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior: my life is all I've got. We are well off to know it ourselves even if our method of learning it is painfully…