this still amuses me.

So, I’d like to begin with two quotations, one from Adrienne Rich and one from the man who selected her first book of poems for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1951. Rich spoke at a reading in 1973 about how her experience of poetry had changed since that first publication, at age 21. “In my earlier poems, I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something; in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.” (from Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, 89)

In 1951, poet W.H. Auden wrote in the foreword to Rich’s first collection of poetry, that “in art as in life, truthfulness is an absolute essential, good manners of enormous importance.” --W. H. Auden (Yale Younger Poets Prize); A.R. Poetry, 125)