Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I turn the pages of my own poems gathered in a single volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the old verse that says it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not what I have written but what I should like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have not had the strength to realize.
—Wallace Stevens, acceptance speech at 1995 National Book Awards ceremony (for The Collected Poems, Knopf, 1954)
No comments:
Post a Comment