ABSTRACT
This chapter shows what indirect self-observation to determine about one of a seventy-two-year-old poet named Tony. It presents a brief introduction to Tony’s life, followed by a literary-critical overview of his poetic oeuvre. The chapter explores Tony’s self-observations via Harre’s several types. It also show how each of the three reveals a separate motivation behind Tony’s compulsion to write. The chapter argues that Tony was once a close friend and protege of first-generation New York School poet Frank O’Hara. When interpreted alongside his life story, analyses of the self-observing language in Tony’s poems helped to reveal a specific cluster of psychological motivations underlying his compulsion to write. These analyses underscore S. Freud’s claim that all genuinely creative writings are the products of more than a single motive, but take a step further by providing a theoretical approach for locating them. Compared to Tony abstract beginnings, the work he was writing by the early seventies was increasingly autobiographical.
