As in life generally, success comes at a price. The better poets can therefore find themselves at odds with society, and there is no doubt that such conflicts make for solitary, cross-grained and somewhat unbalanced personalities. Many past writers had difficult and neurotic personalities, and the same traits are all too evident today. Nonetheless, the absurd positions, sharp feuds and strident ambitions also appear in writers of no talent whatsoever, which suggests that the difficulties are unfortunate side affects of originality, not its sustaining force. Artists may be sometimes unbalanced, but not all unbalanced people are artists.
Creativity differs markedly between the arts and sciences, and even between different art forms.
Nonetheless, most creativity shows four phases - challenge, incubation, illumination and exposition. Driving these phases forward, through many interruptions and loopbacks, is the earnest desire to succeed, which naturally taps some inner need. We make poetry out of the quarrel with ourselves, said Yeats, and these fears and obsessions are highly individual. The lyric poet is very different from the satirist, and neither of these will wish to be the poetic spokesperson of their age in the way that Tennyson, Larkin or Betjeman became in England. By personal difficulties, particularly in childhood, that have been worked through.