Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit—is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, personalized, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody's maxim.

of modernism; The End of the Line, p. 81 - Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)