Overwhelmed by truth, so why not appeal to a higher authority.
Making [an experience] seem beautiful is a little more than just prettying it up. In fact it’s something much more than that. It’s trying to make it acceptable…[and] most truths are unpalatable. You know what a boa constrictor does if it has something to eat that’s unpalatable? It sort of covers it with the boa constrictor equivalent of saliva until it can slide down easily. Well, I think that’s really what I mean by beautifying. If you have a rough truth like ‘life is first boredom then fear’ you’ve got to somehow bring the reader’s mind round to the point where that is the only possible exit from this particular situation. That’s what I mean by making it beautiful. It’s like Shakespeare making _King Lear_ beautiful. _King Lear_ is beautiful but it’s very painful.
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Endlessly, time-honoured irritant,
A bubble is restively forming at your tip.
Burst it as fast as we can –
It will grow again, until we begin dying.Silently it inflates, till we’re enclosed
And forced to start the struggle to get out:
Bestial, intent, real.
The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse,But what sad scapes we cannot turn from then:
What ashen hills! what salted, shrunken lakes!
How leaden the ring looks,
Birmingham magic all discredited,And how remote that bare and sun-scrubbed room,
Intensely far, that padlocked cube of light
We neither define nor prove,
Where you, we dream, obtain no right of entry.
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So little depends on stuff lying around.
Nobody criticises E.P. [Ezra Pound] for being literary, wch to me is the foundation of his feebleness, thinking that poetry is made out of poetry & not out of being alive.
Source: standpointmag.co.uk
Poetry is nothing unless it is the breaking up of routine attitudes toward living. There is therefore something sad about reviewing it. For the assumption behind criticism is that routines of technique, vocabulary, tradition, moral attitudes can be extracted from past or from contemporary poetry and applied to the work under review. Yet that work—if it is worth reviewing—contains an element of that which is unique to the poet as a sensibility, uniquely situated in his own life, a historic and geographical space, unprecedented.
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The finest poetry is the most mendacious.
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This poem I wished to write was to have expressed exactly what I mean when I think the words *I love You*, but I cannot know exactly what I mean; it was to have been self-evidently true, but words cannot verify themselves. So this poem will remain unwritten.
