Pit of the Self

Stanley Kunitz said to me once: “You’ve got to get down into the pit of the self, the real pit, and then you have to find your own way to climb up out of it. And it can’t be anybody else’s way. It has to be yours.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3839/james-wright-the-art-of-poetry-no-19-james-wright