Basically all I know of him is a short poem of his called “Self-Pity”:

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead

from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for

itself.

Sometimes in life you need to feel sorry for yourself and allow yourself to acknowledge that your circumstances are bad, especially if you don’t have a support network around you to offer that external acknowledgement or validation.

Just like you have to forgive yourself for mistakes and challenge yourself to do better or motivate yourself to achieve goals. A human mind needs all these types of things, and when you can’t get them elsewhere you have to get them internally, as a basic measure of self-care. This applies to self pity just like anything else.

Widespread criticism or derision of feeling sorry for one’s self is like victim-blaming, societal defense mechanisms built up in more primitive times, denying psychological realities of human consciousness in favor of tough man caricatures derived from a type of Puritan ethic hangover.

Agreed. Advice that you "can't feel sorry for yourself" feels a lot like much of the other broad, emotional advice out there: aimed at an assumption that most people are trending too far in one direction, and the greatest good is in correcting that direction.

Yea, "self" can be a liability.

Examining self from a third person perspective can be helpful. Hence, "this" should be preferred to "self" :p

In some cases "it" works too.

quite an assumption about that bird