SOURCE: "The Truth of Poetry," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 343-45.

In the following excerpt, Cotter outlines the principal themes of Yevtushenko's poetry in The Collected Poems.

I once reviewed a sequence of poems about a marriage and divorce. The story was detailed, painful, funny, and fully involving. I later learned that the poet had made up the whole thing. I was delighted. I had been taken in by the author's voice and the entire situation he had imagined. The truth of poetry is not in reciting facts but in creating veracity. I ask a poem to be true to itself, to convince me and to capture my attention with its thought, emotion, imagery, and language. Do not preach or put on airs, I tell the poem. Tell the truth, and I'll believe you. What more can a reader ask?

"I'm no good … I...