Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

MacCaig’s quiet reveal here is that devotion, for him, is a working method rather than a personality trait. “In a way” is doing sly labor: it frames his susceptibility to literary infatuation as both limitation and tool, an admission that taste isn’t a stable temple but a weather system. He doesn’t present himself as a sovereign judge of the canon; he’s a reader who gets seized, sometimes for “many years,” sometimes “only for a while.” The oscillation matters. It suggests that influence isn’t a single formative lightning bolt but a series of occupations: one poet moves in, rearranges the furniture, then leaves you with new habits of seeing.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to the prestige performance of having fixed, impeccable preferences. MacCaig implies that serious reading is allowed to be a little embarrassing, a little obsessive, and yes, fickle. “Great passions” borrows the language of romance and appetite, smuggling bodily intensity into what can sound, in other mouths, like polite appreciation. That choice keeps poetry tethered to lived feeling, not just “craft.”

His closing line, “This happens to everybody,” is both modest and democratic. It collapses the distance between poet and audience, refusing the mystique of the elect. Coming from a Scottish poet often praised for clarity and restraint, the remark also functions as a manifesto for openness: the writer’s education is not a ladder out of common experience, but a deeper plunge into it. Passion, even when it shifts, is the engine; the shifting is the proof you’re still alive to language.