Yes thanks for this John - of course, the difference between 'authenticity' and 'sincerity'. Really don't want to resurrect the Wordsworth thing here with regard to his legacy of 'authentic' lexicon and phraseology which appears to be so important to late C20 mainstream poetics (huge rows here concerning that if you remember) but well, yes, it's there.

Yours sincerely

Tim

On 17 May 2018, at 08:43, John Hall wrote:

Leaving aside what you mean by ‘successful poet’, sticking with ‘poet’, Adorno doesn’t qualify. How close does Wordsworth get in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads with his hope to reintroduce into poetry ‘the language of men’. There is a whole line from then on, if not much earlier, where a measure of ‘authenticity’, whether the term is used or not, is to do with the lexicon and phraseology: how closely does this connect with how people actually talk with each other outside poetry? This is not the same measure as the one looking for ‘sincerity’, which I take to have referred to an idea of truth to experience and emotion.