Poet Donald Justice: The very nature of the question makes it hard for me to judge that. I can speak of intentions. I haven't ever intended to put myself dirctly into the poems, not in any of the poems I've written. I've always felt it was the author's privilege to leave himself out if he chose--and I chose, contrary to the choice of certain friends and contemporaries. I suppose I must have been acting originally under the powerful influence of early essays by Eliot in that, and, insofar as it was a conscious choice, seeking the--I've forgotten the phrase--"the effacement of the personality." The self. I have in my poems conscientiously effaced my self, I think, if not my personality. But I might be the last to know if I could be recognized as a person in the poems or not. I am often speaking in some imagined or borrowed voice. That is the way I see it, anyway, when I'm working on poems. I may be writing about things I know personally, even intimately, but to a certain degree I want to be pretending otherwise.
The Donald Justice Interview on His Poetry (interviewed by Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumley)
Interviewer: I would like to hear you talk about what you think is the change between where you were with the first book, Summer Anniversaries, and where you've come to with the [...] [book], Departures. The poems are formally different, of course, but what about the change in the presence of Donald Justice in the poems?
