Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Creeley

Creeley’s line performs a kind of nervous consent, the voice trying to approve of a past it can’t quite justify. “All of which was OK” sounds like closure, but it’s immediately destabilized by the parenthetical wobble of “as that proved then,” a phrase that narrows truth to the temporary jurisdiction of a moment. He isn’t affirming that something was good; he’s admitting it once functioned. In Creeley’s world, usefulness often masquerades as meaning.

The syntax keeps revising itself mid-step, as if the speaker can’t land on a clean declarative sentence without feeling it would be dishonest. “I certainly wouldn’t contradict it” is a backhanded endorsement: the emphasis is on refusal to argue, not on conviction. It’s the rhetoric of someone too alert to language’s betrayals to trust a straightforward “I agree.” The result is a poetics of reluctant assent, where emotional truth arrives as hedging.

Then comes the sly pivot: “as a necessary sense of things.” Creeley isn’t defending the events; he’s defending the need for a story that made them bearable. That’s the subtext: we retrofit our lives with explanations not because they’re airtight, but because they let us continue. In the postwar American lyric landscape Creeley helped define - spare, skeptical, anti-grandiose - this is the signature move. The line makes a small, almost bureaucratic peace with experience, and in doing so exposes how often “OK” is just what we call survival when we don’t have better language ready.