The treatment of self in poetry has become the focal point of the poetic expression, particularly after the rise of modernist poetics, mainly directed by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The two sought to minimize the emphasis on self in order to breed clarity of poetic expression, especially as a contrast to the abstraction of Victorian poetry. Such an effort was expressed in the imagist movement as well as in the use of the objective correlative by T. S. Eliot. This essay examines the achievement of their attempt to transform poets` own self into the poetic self, compared with Robert Lowell`s manifestation of his own self in his later poetry. Early twentieth-century European henomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty found intentionality in human consciousness, an important working of self, thereby admitting the inescapability of the poet`s self in his poetic expression. In a different perspective, post-modernists like Derrida and Lacan also recognized the self in human consciousness, which has been shaped by the history and social environment of language; thus, they cast a great doubt on the authenticity of the self. The primary thrust of this essay is to examine the success of the imagist movement and the impersonaliztion of poetic expression. Toward this purpose, first of all, this essay deals with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; then, Robert Lowell, who rebelled against the dominant poetics of the early twentieth-century, thus choosing to manifest himself in his poetry. The poetic experiments of T. S. Eliot and Pound were enormously dominant in the early twentieth century, breeding a number of followers and sympathizers; nevertheless, it also came to its own limitations in the long run; they failed not merely to minimize the self, but also to transform it into their poetic self, since we find so many traces of the self in their poetry. With the advent of existentialism in popularity among European philosophers right after World War II, I think, the self in human consciousness became of huge importance among the thinkers in other fields. Particularly, American poets` reaction to the dominant poetic experiment, “the Eliot government,” was conspicuous; Robert Lowell`s Life Studies (1959) made a milestone prelude for an expression of self in poetry. With the self as the central focus of the poetic expression, however, he was also in the wake of poetic expression of “the Eliot government.” Poetry as literary work of art has to be defined in terms of the human condition, due to the absolute condition of its author`s limitations as a social being. It is indisputable that T. S. Eliot`s experiment and that of Robert Lowell were remarkable poetic projects through which they attempted to transform their own individual experience (their first materials) into shared experience. But I believe that their failure to arrive at an artistic completion should be found not only in human limitations but in the human condition as well.