Excerpts from Richard Hugo's book

I was reading "The Triggering Town" again yesterday while brushing my kitty. I haven't picked it up in a while, so I just opened it up at a point where I'd folded down one of the page corners. It happened to be the chapter called "Statements of Faith."

"Behind several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem—Eliot's escape from personality, Keats's idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats's notion of the mask, Auden's concept of the poet becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, Valery's idea of a self superior to the self—lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do.
How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing.
...
Many American poets seem to feel personally worthless unless they write. One can easily imagine that, given the conditions of the mind, the feelings of worthlessness may become indistinguishable from the impulse to write."

So that's been turning over in my mind lately and trying to think of other poets I know personally -- there really aren't many, much less any who have confided this to me. It did make me think of someone who was a quite terrible poet—there are only so many times can you use the word "soul" before people stop taking you seriously. Is it possible that he was far too full of himself to think of poetry as anything other than venting over a broken heart? Is it this one-dimensionality that turns me completely off from his abab quatrains, or causes any new poem he writes to be indistinguishable from all the others?

That is not to say that you need to hate yourself to be a poet, of course. But however you see yourself will inevitably be all over your poems. So try not to think of yourself as such a douchebag hotshot.