Exploring the Poetic Personality: A Quantitative Research on Personality of Aspiring Poets

Personality is the unique way in which each individual thinks, acts, and feels throughout life. Creative writing is a way of studying an individual observes his/her surroundings and how they sew them in a string of thoughtful words. Poetry is a component of creative writing.  Every poem that the poet composes is not merely the expression of his emotions, thoughts, reflections, and vision, but each word and line in the poem carries the personality of the poet. The objective of the present study was to explore the personality of poets and was analyzed quantitatively. BIG Five Personality (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) was administered to 100 undergraduates (50 poets and 50 non poets) of the age group 18-21 years. The assumptions of t-test were tested using levene’s test of homogeneity and variances and Shapiro-Wilk test of normality. T-test revealed significant differences in three traits i.e, openness, extraversion and neuroticism. This suggested that poets are more open, introvert and high on neuroticism as compared to non-poets. The research was concluded by briefly foregrounding some of the study’s implications and future directions.