The relations between reality and language, self and mask, and subjectivity and reality all point to P.K. Page's interest in the conditions in which selves are formed, experienced, and conceptualized. The modern artist creates life's meaning by finding/imposing pattern; Page shows her Romantic and Modernist heritage in her poetry, but goes beyond these classifications to a new paradigm of the relation between self and world. Page's work moves from an early emphasis on alienation as a condition for modern life to the discovery of a self that is related to the universe on levels that are discoverable through the heightened and intensified consciousness that poetry itself makes possible.