Credo

Too many critics look too much, I think,
For hints of intertextuality.
For being heavy-laden, poems sink
Beneath the burden of eternity.
To say an image in a sonnet must
Be correlated through a lenghty past
To ancient writers is a sort of lust
For hope that our own culture may so last.
I do not mean that poems can't refer
To other poems, or derive more weight
From what the other meant; I just prefer
To take the poem in its native state
Before I let the ancients show they'd worn
Its garlands when its author lay unborn.