In Green Altars, I argue that for the authors I discuss  the ‘gift’ of creativity seemed to require a corresponding personal loss. The vocation of poetry, as they variously conceived of it, had an essentially self-sacrificial dimension. Whether this ‘loss’ was defined in autobiographical, psychological or spiritual terms, these authors understood the destructive as well as creative powers that the call to be a poet inevitably released.

 

The book is therefore a meditation on the self-effacing character of certain modes of poetic creativity, as well as the impersonal quality of the literary works that issue from them. My argument in a nutshell is that, for the writers above, being a poet was felt to require a radical sacrifice of authorial intention: an ‘extinction of personality’ that resulted, paradoxically, in poems that have a mysterious power of survival. I argue that Romantic and Modernist reflections on the ethics and aesthetics of creative endeavour, still have urgent value and resonance today.