Art & Creativity Quote by John Barton

Barton is drawing a hard line between confession and craft, and he’s doing it with the kind of moral clarity poets rarely allow themselves. “Must decide” turns aesthetic preference into an ethical choice: writing isn’t just self-expression, it’s self-restraint. The risk he names - sentimentality - isn’t merely being “too emotional.” It’s the cheapening of emotion through coercion, when a poem pressures the reader to feel what the poet is already feeling. That pressure is what makes sentimentality cloying: it’s emotion without earned complexity.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the myth of authenticity as rawness. Barton implies that the poet’s most serious responsibility is not to bleed on the page but to build a situation where feeling can arise naturally, almost against the writer’s will. “Not to impose” suggests power dynamics: the poet can dominate the reader’s response with melodrama, familiar cues, and prepackaged conclusions. Refusing that dominance is an act of respect, and a bet on the reader’s intelligence.

Context matters here: post-Confessional poetry gave English-language verse permission to be intimate, but it also created a marketplace for intimacy-as-performance. Barton, a contemporary poet writing in the wake of that tradition, sounds like someone committed to lyric intensity without the manipulative lighting effects. The intent isn’t to drain the poem of feeling; it’s to let feeling arrive through image, music, and precision - so the reader recognizes it as their own experience, not the poet’s demand.