true poems

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 1955 National Book Awards ceremony (for The Collected Poems, Knopf, 1954)

stealth poems

There are many songs that poets don’t recognize as true poems.