Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

Broughton’s line is less a compliment to “poets” than a dare to everyone else: if you feel the call early, you’re already condemned - or liberated - from the respectable routes. “Born” and “in his cradle” crank the claim to mythic volume, framing artistry not as a hobby but as an inborn appetite. The sentence performs a kind of self-authorizing prophecy: you don’t choose a poetic life, you discover you were drafted into it before you could even speak.

The subtext is combative. By declaring the poetic life “the only life worth living,” Broughton isn’t pleading for arts funding or polite appreciation; he’s rejecting bourgeois measures of worth - productivity, status, stability. The absolutism is strategic. It dramatizes how art-making can feel: not one good option among many, but the single route that keeps you from spiritual suffocation. The cradle image also sneaks in a warning about loneliness: if you’re wired this way, you may never fully belong to the practical world.

Context matters: Broughton was a filmmaker and countercultural figure associated with mid-century American experimental cinema and later the West Coast queer arts scene. For a director, “poetic life” reads as an artistic ethic, not a literary credential: living with heightened attention, appetite, risk, play. The line works because it turns aesthetics into existential stakes. It flatters the artist, yes, but it also insists that the real scandal is living any other way on purpose.