The word “sincerity” has a strange wiggle in discussions of poetry. Some use it as an accolade and others as a criticism, and it’s not always that these people disagree about the work at hand. The word has simply come to mean various things. Much of this slipperiness derives from its being a relatively new word and concept. In his enduring study, Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling located the origins of sincerity in the Protestant Reformation. Beginning in the sixteenth century, there appeared new images of the writer as the individual believer speaking from faith alone, and later as the citizen acting within democratic structures. These images found a natural fruition in America, itself  the result of  those historical currents.