"A great speech is literature"
About this Quote
Calling a great speech "literature" is a deliberate status grab: it yanks political oratory out of the disposable news cycle and plants it in the longer shelf life of art. Noonan, a speechwriter who helped script the Reagan era's most quotable lines, knows exactly what she is defending. In a culture that treats politics as performance and writing as a niche hobby, the line argues that the best public language deserves the same seriousness we grant novels, poems, and plays.
The intent is partly protective. If a speech is literature, then it can be judged by craft, not just by policy outcomes or partisan allegiance. That reframes the speechwriter from a hired hand into an authorial presence, and it asks audiences to listen for cadence, metaphor, and narrative architecture, not merely applause lines. The subtext: persuasion is aesthetic. People don't remember white papers; they remember sentences that sound inevitable.
There's also a quiet rebuke embedded here to the contemporary erosion of rhetoric. Noonan's claim implies that most speeches fail because they are not written to be read, re-read, and lived with. The standard for "great" isn't viral impact; it's reusability across time, the way Lincoln or King can be quoted without a footnote and still feel electrically current.
Context matters: as a professional writer who trafficked in statecraft, Noonan is staking a thesis about democracy itself. If public language can reach literary height, it can enlarge the public, not just manipulate it. The wager is that style isn't decoration; it's the delivery system for civic meaning.
The intent is partly protective. If a speech is literature, then it can be judged by craft, not just by policy outcomes or partisan allegiance. That reframes the speechwriter from a hired hand into an authorial presence, and it asks audiences to listen for cadence, metaphor, and narrative architecture, not merely applause lines. The subtext: persuasion is aesthetic. People don't remember white papers; they remember sentences that sound inevitable.
There's also a quiet rebuke embedded here to the contemporary erosion of rhetoric. Noonan's claim implies that most speeches fail because they are not written to be read, re-read, and lived with. The standard for "great" isn't viral impact; it's reusability across time, the way Lincoln or King can be quoted without a footnote and still feel electrically current.
Context matters: as a professional writer who trafficked in statecraft, Noonan is staking a thesis about democracy itself. If public language can reach literary height, it can enlarge the public, not just manipulate it. The wager is that style isn't decoration; it's the delivery system for civic meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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