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A married man in his late twenties, a college instructor in English literature, had long been completely convinced that he was a writer, despite a paucity of factual evidence in support of this cherished belief. It was not only that he had no ambition other than to be a writer, but he was, in his own mind, primarily and above all a poet.
He had some time since written a novel of which he was much enamored while he was writing it. To his understandable chagrin, it was not accepted for publication. His pristine certainty of the complete undeservedness of this rejection he came in analysis to regard as having been quite preposterous. He had also written a dozen or so short stories, none of them even submitted for publication, and most of them, indeed, left in various stages of incompleteness.
He had, however, written a number of poems, several of which had been published. But the rejection of others by the same periodical which published other poems of obviously inferior worth (some of them—the last indignity—by former students of his) gave rise in him to an alternation of depression and rage against the editor who was so palpably unjust. It is noteworthy that, apart from the novel written when he was a neophyte, his poems were the sole product of his pen which he had ever brought himself to submit for possible publication. It could fairly be said that he made financial remuneration possible only in instances of that type of writing least productive of such rewards. He himself much later remarked, 'Not even Robert Frost could support himself by writing poetry'. These attitudes might be inferred to represent an acting out of the double fantasy which conceivably underlay his conception of himself as primarily and above all a poet. This fantasy was in part masochistic, and in its self-defeating and self-disadvantaging