Poets Are Simply Those Who Have

From The Power of Myth (1988). Campbell made this remark in the context of explaining what he meant by "follow your bliss" — countering the misreading that bliss is simply pleasure or professional success. He held that the poet's vocation is a model of living from one's deep center: not a career path but an entire orientation of consciousness, in which the daily work of attending to language and image is inseparable from the inner life. Campbell's broader argument was that in a culture organized around economic utility, those who maintain contact with their genuine creative calling — whatever form it takes — are in touch with a sustaining and transformative energy that purely goal-directed lives cannot access.