Actually, he didn't "saddle new ... poets with selves" ~ as you have read,
he allowed the multiple personalities to emerge: he was releasing the
potentiality in himself for high-grade hysteria coupled with dissociation on
a very specialised verbal but not psycho-socially interactive level (i.e. he
kept it to poetry writing), creating something like the personae of Pound's
early poems or the different roles played by Peter Sellers in one film
(didn't you mention one a few e-mails back? He used to become ~ and summon
up the discourse of ~ different figures on The Goon Show, I've seen him do
it). Even those driven by their multiple personalities (rather than driving
them like Pessoa) are often able to enter and exit them like actors to a
certain extent. It's not the selves that are "problematic" but the
personalities, with their apparently coherent sets of attitudes, traits,
abilities etc. I trespass on this rather treacherous psychological ground to
try to clarify (I'm really not at all sure about it "myself") the necessary
differences between self and persona, or mask. Think of what Yeats said on
that subject.
Martin
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