#on sentimentality

‘— the amorphous deliquescence of sentimentality.’

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps.

melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.

Only highly developed cultures foster feelings of nostalgia. The revolutionists must stop for orangeade.

The poem is nothing but a gigantic, disembodied hand pointing a finger at someone. That finger is a magnet and a conductor: it reaches out to the vague, ill-defined you like God reaching within an inch of Adam and it charges the reader with all the responsibility in the world: go figure these things out for yourself, while you still have blood in your veins.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.