Is honesty important in poetry

Jordan (I)

Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves?
Must all be veil'd, while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;
I envy no man's nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, my God, my King.

—George Herbert

poetinahat said:

Concepts get a one-time exemption: Tristan Tsara shredding paper and throwing it in the air, Marcel Duchamp hanging a urinal on a gallery wall, John Cage sitting before a piano in Harvard Square. The first time that happens, the point's been made, and even then, it's an intellectual point, not an aesthetic one.

After that, it's just regurgitation, and I call bullshit.

Click to expand...

I agree with you in principle, but on the other I went to see Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth at the Tate Modern (a huge crack in a concrete floor) and I loved it. Mind you, I didn't the intellectual stuff about borders and immigration. It just looked like a huge crack.