“But to be a poet is to accept the responsibility of speaking the truth!”

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 5
The Town (1957)

We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…

On the poet having both responsibility and freedom in “Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera” https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/current-issue-4/features/interview-with-juan-felipe-herrera/ (Gulf Stream, 2015)

they weren’t always
Source: Blue Mars (1996), Chapter 13, “Experimental Procedures” (p. 657)

The Poet's Poetic Responsibility (2012)

1960s
Source: 'A period of Exploration', McChesney, as quoted in The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p 35

The Regiment of the Senses http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=296&cat=5 as translated by Manuel Savidis
Context: Speak not of guilt, speak not of responsibility. When the Regiment of the Senses parades by, with music, and with banners; when the senses shiver and shudder, it is only a fool and and an irreverent person that will keep his distance, who will not embrace the good cause, marching towards the conquest of pleasures and passions.
All of morality’s laws – poorly understood and applied – are nil and cannot stand even for a moment, when the Regiment of the Senses parades by, with music, and with banners.

State of the Art (2000)

a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
"The Poet's Vision" (1959)