Great novels -- Wonderful poetry

[Lizzie]

Are you indifferent to your own emotions as well? Or just about manipulation from the outside?

Ray

I'm really interested in this question, Ray. Here's an excerpt from a book I'm reading by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams:

"WS Graham says 'Do not be sentimental in your art.' Why does he say this, and what does he mean? Don't a lot of people find great pleasure in sentimental songs and books? Another Scot, the poet and critic GS Fraser, describes in his autobiography what happened when, as children, he and his sister went to see a particularly sentimental film. His sister, embarrassed by the tear-jerking nature of what they were watching, would start to suck the fingers of her gloves and they gave the name 'glove-sucky' to any film that made a too obvious play on their emotions. This shows that some people resist sentimentality. The embarrassment it makes them feel is caused by an awareness that they're being manipulated, and they don't like being manipulated, whether by films, politicians or poems. For writing to reach the level of art it needs to persuade the reader that the emotion in it is founded in the truth of the situation depicted. It has to be properly motivated. When it's not, it's sentimental -- it's imitation emotion, not the real thing."