Good Poets

Speaking of Basil Hallward, an artist, one of the characters from the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the following comment was made.

"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."

Dare I, therefore, consider myself -in an absolute absence of humility - a "great poet"? I write of things that I dare not (as yet) realize. I am thinking of the more sensually charged pieces I've developed (erotic, if you will), but also of my other pieces. What about the more appropriate ones? Even the "Christian" ones? In these, the latter, I am depicting the kind of person that writes about walking on water (aka, faith) or performing heroic feats of spiritual calibre, and yet I fail to see that in myself. I aspire to it (just as I aspire for the sensuality) but it isn't a part of me. At least not yet. It will be one day (I hope).