The price and joy of the writer's vocation

I...would say with W.H. Auden, "writers are not passive recipients of good fortune, art is a vocation for which a price must be paid.  In being a writer one leaves the family hearth...Each must go his way alone, every step of it, learning for himself by painful trial and shaming error, never resting long, soon proceeding to risk total defeat in some new task." (Garbled by me, but what I feel - plus the fun and exhilaration of one's sundry experiments.) - Marianne Moore (from a letter to Wallace Stevens)