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Who alive can say,
“Thou art no poet; may'st not tell thy dreams?”
Paul: But he attributed his escape to the Offices of the Heavenly Muse— …
Roland: You mean to say you think we ought to take his description seriously? Of course it's wonderful poetry—
P.A.: “Of course”, but Virgil and Homer and Milton were not writing “poetry”; they were writing “seriously”. They wrote poetry because it was the most serious way of writing.
In his quest to discover the truth about himself, Bion uses the freedom of the autobiographical books to remember, or rather to relive in the present, the teaching-by-example of those who contributed to the qualities of his internal objects. Here he endeavours to shed the obscuring veil of respectability that, he felt had always hampered him, and to follow the example of the poets—to “write seriously”, despite his intense frustration at feeling unable to achieve