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As I read this thread, I am reminded of something very powerful which I once read in the collected letters of the poet Wallace Stevens. Someone asked for his opinion of a certain published poet, and Stevens simply replied, "He does not write as though he HAS to write."
When one MUST write, regardless of the consequences; when one MUST write even though it means a life of failure, scorn, poverty and the loss of family and friends; when one MUST write even at the risk of one's live and freedom in a totalitarian society; when one MUST write as an expression of one's very being, a need as primordial as thirst and hunger, then one is a writer in the utmost sense of the word, and success or income has no bearing on the matter but is simply a by-product of what one MUST do.
For a writer such as this, all of life and existence is a means to an end and that end is writing. For all others, writing is a means to some end, whether it be recognition or income or something else.
A writer such as I have described does not choose to be what they are, for had they some choice in the matter, one could not truly say that they write because they MUST.
Since Wallace Stevens has been quoted, one may reasonably assume that Stevens wrote because he MUST write. Indeed, he was a very successful Hartford Insurance company Vice President. Many of his business associates had no idea that he was a world-renowned poet. If one reads the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, and his essays on imagination, "The Necessary Angel" (a title taken from his poem "Angel Among Paysans") then one begins to understand the life of someone who wrote because he MUST write.
Wallace Stevens was personal friends with both Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. Stevens used to laugh at Sandburg behind his back for Sandburg's habit of arriving from week on the road, giving readings, and counting all his payment checks over and over like some miser.
I do not imagine that Carl Sandburg wrote because he MUST. I imagine that writing was for Sandburg a means to some other end. That does not mean that Sandburg was bad or that Sandburg was wrong or even that Sandburg had a choice in the matter. I imagine that Frost wrote because he MUST.
It would be an interesting and instructive exercise to expand upon this notion of what it means to write because one MUST and, having constructed this lens of narrative necessity, to survey the panorama of the centuries of world literature seeking out those who wrote because they MUST, and what it is that makes their writing different from other writers and how their writing makes us different.
Frost once spoke of that line from a poem which "immortally" wounds.
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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