WHEN I LEFT COLLEGE and set out to be a poet I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever. That’s just how I phrased it: live forever. It seemed to me the only noble ambition, and its fumes were evident in my contempt for the lesser aims I sniffed out in other writers. It was, I suppose, a transparent attempt to replace the soul with the self—for all the talk of the “extinction of personality,” I suspect there is no artist who does not cling to the belief that something essential of himself inheres in his art—and it was the first casualty of Christianity for me.
