Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Identity is supposed to be a clean narrative: one continuous self, neatly carried from childhood to whatever comes next. Koch refuses that tidy story without throwing it away. “I certainly have the feeling” opens with a sly, almost conversational hedge, as if he’s gently poking at the arrogance of certainty. He doesn’t claim philosophical proof; he claims an experience. That matters for a poet, for whom the authority of a line often comes from how it sounds true in the body before it stands up in a seminar.

The sentence hinges on a productive contradiction: “the same person” versus “changed a great deal.” Koch is making room for the way time actually behaves in a life - less like a straight line than like revisions in a draft. The subtext is that continuity is an emotional need as much as a metaphysical fact. We keep the “feeling” of sameness because it’s what makes memory usable, responsibility legible, love coherent. Yet he won’t flatter the reader with permanence. Change is not cosmetic here; it’s “a great deal,” the kind that should, in theory, rupture the story.

Contextually, Koch’s New York School sensibility helps: playful on the surface, serious about perception underneath. These poets distrusted grand systems but trusted the lived moment, including its inconsistencies. The line reads like a quiet manifesto for that tradition: the self isn’t a monument, it’s a moving target - and still, somehow, you recognize it. The intent isn’t to solve the paradox; it’s to name the paradox as the most honest form of autobiography.