Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

Mark Strand’s line lands like a dry shrug from inside the cathedral. He’s not romanticizing poetry; he’s itemizing its humiliations: no money, too few readers, an audience smaller than the culture’s appetite for slogans. The wit is in the phrasing, especially “seem to think,” which gently questions the sanity of anyone who volunteers for this arrangement. Strand isn’t pleading for sympathy. He’s diagnosing a collective delusion that poets share with their patrons: the stubborn belief that some forms of attention are worth more than the market will certify.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats value as revenue and relevance as reach. Strand doesn’t argue that poetry should be profitable; he argues that its lack of profit isn’t proof of its uselessness. “As widely read as it should be” carries a double charge: it’s both complaint and ethical claim. Poetry isn’t just under-consumed; it’s being withheld from public life by the machinery of entertainment, education, and publishing that rewards speed, clarity, and outrage over ambiguity and inwardness.

Context matters: Strand came of age in late-20th-century American letters, when poetry’s institutional home shifted toward universities and prizes, even as mass readership thinned. His sentence sits in that paradox. Plenty of people keep writing because poetry offers a kind of durable intensity - a way to think and feel with precision - even when the culture’s loudest feedback loop says it’s irrational. Strand makes that irrationality sound, oddly, like integrity.