Today’s New York Times essay “Poet vs. Novelist” by Pulitzer Prize Poet Philip Schultz is on Multiple Personality

Philip Schultz is an award-winning poet and an unpublished novelist. But the point of his essay is his subjective experience that he has a poetry-writing self and a novel-writing self, and that these subjective selves feel, to him, like separate people, with distinctly different attitudes toward each other.

“I’ve often suspected that the novelist in me resents everything the poet writes, maybe especially the very desire to write poetry…Perhaps the more interesting perspective is that of the poet in me toward the novelist. Courteous and cautious, the poet is something of a gentleman in his behavior toward the fiction writer. He tends to be deferential, even encouraging. The fiction writer could be equally successful if he just tried a little harder. The fiction writer, on the other hand, never wanted anything to do with the poet. His sole ambition was conquest and domination…The novelist can’t stand the idea of needing poetry, however much he likes nice-sounding language.”

Maybe great poets have multiple personality, too.