truth-priority

'The problem with strategic irony is that it avoids responsibility; it is ‘defensive’, ‘pusillanimous’, ‘craven’—a mere ‘manipulation of tone’, little more than ‘attitudinizing’. It puts the emphasis on the writer’s relationship with the reader, rather than on the matter of the poem, and so it is both tiresomely ingratiating and contemptibly apologetic.'

• Intelligence with regard to form, which is, or at least should be a basic prerequisite of all poetry, may be the only thing which can, when raised high enough, replace affectation with artfulness, and remove the obligation to irony—for those who wish to avoid it. I mean to suggest that both affectation and artfulness, which are usually taken for bad qualities, are in another sense fundamental elements of poetry (and lyric, perhaps, especially).