T seemed strange to most of my friends, and doubtless to all my acquaintances, that just as I achieved a recognized standing as a fiction writer, in some respects a head-liner, I not only gave up fiction writing and turned to poetry, but also became a psycho-analyst. It was bad enough to become a poet, and a free verse poet to boot, but to become a psycho-analyst! That, I was told, would end me as a writer.

As a matter of fact, I was born left-handed, and was taught to write with my right hand. And just so, I was born, I believe, a poet, and was taught by necessity to write prose. I I doubt if I should ever have written an acceptable story if I had not, at 24, found myself with a wife and and baby and no means of supporting them. Of course I could take an "honest job." I did; for I was an expert stenographer and typist. But at the end of one week I resigned. I knew in my bones that nothing could satisfy me but writing.

About this time Rupert Hughes, then one of the editors of Appleton's Magazine, since defunct, took some of my poetry; and I told him my desperate plight. He said I would have to write stories for the magazines. There was nothing else possible. I went home, and setting my teeth against poetry, ground out

a story. It was a poor sort of story, and Rupert Hughes, I am sure, rewrote parts of it. But not only was it accepted, but Rupert Hughes said to me: "I could give you fifty dollars for this and you'd take it. But I'm going to make it a hundred, to set your standard with the other magazines." A magic door had opened; I had found the way

It was, nevertheless, not an easy way. You see, I was a poet, and there was always something in my stories that puzzled most of the editors. In Hamlet, for instance, you find language like this: "O that this too, too solid flesh would melt." That is all right in poetry. In prose it sounds too emotional. I was too emotional, too poetic. But a strange thing happened: when an editor printed one of these over-emotional stories, he had quite a come-back from his readers. I remember one such story which the old American Magazine turned down, because it was over-done, sentimental, perhaps even it looked a trifle hysterical. Then Everybody's took it, and they had a waste basket full of letters from all parts of the country. It proved a sensation.

Thus, in perhaps four years' time I became a leading writer, and was known for a type of story all my own.

But all this time I went around feeling like

a veritable fraud. You see, if I had followed my own bent, I should have written poems and poetic plays no closer to everyday reality than the operas of Wagner. And the fact was, that I was n't writing so much out of a knowledge of life as out of a dream of life. I did n't know enough. I had n't had enough experience. I felt that as a fiction writer I was a bluff and that the bluff was bound to break down.

Then something else happened which made me interested in psycho-analysis. Something in me was going dead. And it began to show in my work. I could no more pull off the big emotional scenes in the stories. They became mechanical and, to my way of thinking, dull. The reason for it was this: I was a born poet, and for years I had set myself against my gift; had, as it were, betrayed it by neglect, and the result was that not only was something in my nature snuffed out, but even my work declined. I began to understand why so many artists have starved in a garret, why Balzac was willing to live in utmost poverty for ten years before he succeeded, why Dante gave up everything else to write The Divine Comedy. The answer is simple: one has to. One is born to a job and must do it. And if one puts off the day of reckoning, it comes with a power of its own and a good deal of disaster.

I needed help. I needed to understand more about the workings of my own nature; I needed to know why I was in such a condition, and what would pull me out of it. I was n't sure that I was a poet. I was n't sure that I had a life-work. And even if I had been sure, here I was with a wife and two boys and the need of making a lot of money. What should I do about that?

It was then I became a poet, and in ten years accomplished what I believe is the book of my life, namely, "The Sea." Until that book was finished, I was driven as if by a demon. Time and again, when there was money-pressure, I tried to write stories. I could not. The work was meager and poor. My heart was n't in it.

Nor must it be thought that I believed consistently that I should never write stories again. It wasn't that. As I said, I had felt that as a story writer I was a bluff. I had felt that I needed to know human nature down to the roots before I wrote real fiction. And now, in these ten years of poetry, I learned about human nature.

Naturally, when you are analyzed, you learn about yourself. Analysis is a slow painstaking method. It is not a method of “healing"; it is not "suggestion." It is a scientific process which has developed through long years of research, experiment, trial, and error; and its main development has come, not through people unacquainted with the scientific knowledge of the body and the mind, but through powerful medical doctors, physicians who were also psychiatrists, like Dr. Freud of Vienna, Dr. Jung of Zurich, and Dr. Hinkle of New York.

I learnt about myself. I had the adventure of an inner development. And the process helped me to write my poetry. Let me give an example:

One of the most powerful poems I ever wrote is called "Hebrews." For some months I had the idea of the poem in my head, and numberless times I tried to write it. It was always a failure. What it lacked was a great music. I knew the poem had to swing on a marvellous sort of chant, and I could n't somehow catch hold of it. Then one week-end I was up in the country. That afternoon I tried to write "Hebrews" and failed. Wearied out, and disappointed, I lay down and fell

I said that when the day of reckoning comes, it comes, if delayed, with disaster. In this deadening of my nature, my marriage also becomes a dead thing. There was nothing but dissension in the house; the children were suffering. My wife needed help as much as I. It was then we went to an analyst, and made some discoveries. We soon faced the truth

asleep. As soon as I slept, I dreamt. I dreamt that I went into Huyler's and asked for a chocolate ice cream soda. The girl was slow. I grew impatient. I seized the glass and myself turned the spigot. Then just as I turned the spigot and the fizz hit the cream, I heard five miraculous bars of music. This woke me up. I knew at once that I had the music for the poem.

From my knowledge of analysis I understood the dream. I was seeking the "drink of the Gods," the poet's inspiration; the drink that the ancients believed in. My dream showed it in a homely modern version. But I had refused to wait till it came. I forced matters by eternally scratching away trying to write the poem; and so I had made it come. That is, made the music come. I recognized the music, and now sat down and tried to find the words that would in poetry convey some of the sound I had heard as music. As soon as I found them, the poem wrote itself.

Naturally I felt there was something in a science which gave me such a direct help in my art. And indeed I have never written a poem that had deep power without being guided by my dreams, which often told me not only what to write but how to write it.

If, however, I was learning a great deal about myself, I still felt an overpowering urge to know more about others. I felt that if I should ever write fiction again, I must know people, know them from head to foot and inside out. You can see how I was tempted to be an analyst. Here was a method that not only stripped human nature naked, but then vivisected it. Here was a weapon for a fiction writer, a way of insight sharp and deep and sure. People came to you; they not only told you everything they knew about themselves, all their secrets, all their shames, sins, hopes, etc., but you then proceeded, with the help of dreams and the analytic technic, to find out things about them they themselves did not know. That is to say, that after they were naked, you laid them open as neatly as a surgeon and studied the works.

wanted to be an analyst. One was perhaps just about the opposite of the other. The first was that I had suffered a great deal myself and had a natural impulse to relieve the sufferings of others. The second was that I had still the problem of earning a living. I could n't write stories; but I could be an analyst.

Naturally I did n't set sail by myself. It is a dangerous business monkeying with the minds and souls of people. It is dangerous also to try to cure a man through a mental process when his deeper trouble is physical, some hidden disease which only a doctor could discover. Hence I began my work as assistant to a well-known analyst, who was also a medical doctor. Only certain cases were entrusted to me. But they were enough; they served in every sense.

I presume if any of my ex-patients read the above, they will be shocked and alarmed. They will think: "What! was he the coldblooded artist all the time, the artist of whom Shaw wrote that he would turn his mother's milk into printer's ink; was he sitting there using me as copy, as means to writing fiction; was his evident sympathy mere play-acting? etc., etc."

Not at all. I am merely trying the almost impossible, or perhaps the really impossible. I am trying to be honest. I am trying to say that I was an artist, an analyst and a man; that my motives were mixed, as the motives of all men and women are mixed; that sometimes I even forgot about art, and was engrossed in trying to help, or trying to defend myself against my patients..

For it is not an easy thing to be a psychoanalyst. It demands something higher than human nature furnishes. If an analyst were all that his patients demand of him he would be part god and part machine. He would be infallible, wise, temperate, balanced, happy, and at the same time quite impervious to the sensations of shame, insult, intrigue, passion .