In her essay "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," Flannery O'Connor wrote:

One of the most common and saddest spectacles is that of a person of really fine sensibility and acute psychological perception trying to write fiction by using these qualities alone. This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

My assumption is that O'Connor was speaking about prose fiction here; but of course other art forms can also be fiction, which is why I dislike the fact that this word has become a synonym for "short story or novel." I think it reinforces a misapprehension, common even among writers themselves, that narrative first-person poetry is basically a hepped-up diary entry, a compressed personal memoir, an anecdotal musing.

No. Great poems are lies. Like "fiction," they strive to lie in service of Truth. But they are dramatic inventions; they are exaggerations and unreliable narrations. They cobble together events that never happened simultaneously; they kill off members of the poet's family because their names have too many syllables for the line; they ruthlessly darken shadows and sharpen ambiguities. Being a poet really is a terrible vocation . . . and I'm using the word terrible in the sense of "terrible monster." Meanwhile, as O'Connor pointed out, we are choking in our own dust.

Which brings me back to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange, one for the other giv'n.

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:

There never was a better bargain driv'n.

His heart in me, keeps me and him in one,

My heart in him, his thoughts and senses guides.

He loves my heart, for once it was his own:

I cherish his, because in me it bides.

His heart his wound received from my sight;

My heart was wounded, with his wounded heart,

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still methought in me his hurt did smart;

Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his.

This sonnet, which yesterday read like a cynical bargain, today, in my present state of mind, almost seems like an ars poetica: an attempt to describe the way in which life wounds the poet and the poet wounds life . . . "both equal hurt, and in this change sought our bliss," for when the poem is made, those cruelties become elements of transfiguration. "My true love hath my heart, and I have his."