A poet's passion
Even worse than having nothing to say, perhaps, is emotional poverty—feeling used up, both by the pain of events in life and by the demands of his art. He once wrote: "[poets] are so much less sensitive from having overused their sensibilities. Men who have to feel for a living would unavoidably become altogether unfeeling except professionally" (SL 300). Whatever the basis, the poem ends with the fear of one's own emptiness, one's own nothingness. To traverse these spaces inside the self is to traverse the barren.
This part of Judith Oster's analysis of Robert Frost's "Desert Places" really touched me. As a poet, myself, I must admit that both Oster and Frost hit on a shred of truth. I can't even count all the times I have been called insensitive or emotionally cold, yet when I write my main objective is to evoke and explore emotions, both within myself and within my readers.