Life & Wisdom Quote by Stevie Smith

A small manifesto disguised as a shrug, Stevie Smith’s line flattens the romantic myth of the Poet as Oracle. “All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication” is blunt on purpose: not “beauty,” not “immortality,” not the performance of depth. Communication is her metric, and “strong” implies force, clarity, transmission - a message that lands. It’s an almost anti-literary standard coming from someone deeply literary, which is exactly the point: she’s puncturing the self-regard that can gather around poetry like incense.

Then she swivels the labor away from self-expression and toward receptivity. “All the poet has to do is listen” reads like humility, but it’s also a claim about craft. Listening suggests attentiveness to speech rhythms, overheard social codes, private panic, the dark jokes people tell themselves. Smith’s poems often wear a nursery-rhyme surface over something existential and jagged; listening is how you catch that mismatch.

“The poet is not an important fellow” is her dry corrective to the cult of personality. It’s also feminist-coded without announcing itself: in a literary world that prized certain kinds of masculine seriousness, she refuses grandeur and refuses permission. The final sentence is the coldest comfort: “There will also be another poet.” It demotes the individual to a relay runner. Art continues; the ego doesn’t get the last word. The subtext is both liberating and lethal: write because the work needs doing, not because you’re irreplaceable.