Have you ever taken a writing workshop? A lot of what workshopping is, is to help people figure out why they write the way that they do and to get perspectives on how other people who write view the work and why. This format is typically brutal and can be quite good at toughening people up for when they do begin submitting work.

One of my mentors died three days ago and he was considered by some to be one of the greatest living American poets. In his view though, he was an utter failure and utterly unimportant as a poet. In fact, I (and I'm not alone in this, I'm sure) think he might have garnered much more critical acclaim had he been less prickly and less interested in pushing his writing as far as he possibly could. I mean, as far as I could see, he pissed everyone off at one point or another.

I bring him up for two other reasons. One is that he was brutal and unflinching in his criticism of poetry and instilled in all his workshop students (that made it through his classes) that this particular brutality and desire to push work as far as it will go even if it's being praised, is a necessity. This personal critical eye must also be tempered with the willingness to get the shit beat out of oneself. Sure, your friends may like it, but at the end of the day they might not know what "good" is. You're right to question your work, but you're wrong to let it cripple you.

The other reason I bring him up is because he kept a blog of some of the rejection letters he received over his long career, which you can find here.

The first poem I felt pretty good about that I sent out to publication was accepted in The Emerson Review, which is a difficult market to get published in even for Emerson students. My thesis advisor was the editor of Ploughshares and he told me he thought my stuff was pretty great. But the best compliment I ever got in regard to my work was from that mentor I mentioned, Bill Knott, who said he thought I was talented. Not pretty good, not great, just talented. It was one of three compliments he gave out that semester, the others being about how one girl was good at writing abortion poems and how another guy would be a good poet if anyone (including the guy he was addressing) had any idea what the fuck he was writing about. I don't think my stuff is that great, but I don't think it's any worse (or not much worse) than stuff I see published in a lot of respected journals either. Either way, it's getting submitted somewhere.

My point is, poetry is necessarily something that makes a writer vulnerable and that's not something anyone can tell another person how to get over. I suppose you could stuff all your poems into an old drawer to be discovered upon your death, but I have my doubts as to the likelihood of that strategy succeeding twice.