If you are a poet or a creative person you may feel the changes around you and in your life much more than others. This is so because you are more open to experiencing things, generally, than the non-poet. The world (not the material world but just the world) matters more to you and therefore you get affected by the slightest change that may occur in it. The world keeps changing at all times. These changes are more visible to the sensitive soul. He can see or notice things more minutely. There are people who can, as Shakespeare would say, ‘sleep in spite of thunder’ or, pass through a garden without noticing a single flower.

The creative mind is more restless and therefore in need of a soothing calm or balm which his surroundings may or may not provide. His pain though of a personal nature can easily be transferred to the more general plane. He tends to see patterns in life’s schemes more easily than one who considers life to unfold mechanically, without design. The creative mind never loses sight of the universe even when it considers issues of the most personal nature. William Blake spoke of seeing a world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. This may seem an exaggeration, but to a creative mind it is quite the thing to happen.

Society is often at odds with the creative temperament. The responses of the creative person can seem peculiar and abnormal particularly to the practical though generally insensitive mind. The creative mind is a strange mixture of the highly personal and the highly impersonal. At one level it can experience virtually anything very personally and yet at another level is goes to great distances from the self, becoming part of another’s feelings, joys or pains. The highest style of an author therefore combines the very personal with the very impersonal. At the creative moment the author dies personally even as he remains keenly alive impersonally.

The poetic personality can be irritating for one who fails to see the restlessness of the creative soul. Of course this feeling can be mutual for the creative other who may wonder why the world is so insensitive to such vital matters.