Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

A small sentence that lands like a shrug, then starts radiating implications. Norman MacCaig’s “And it’s impossible for me to read Henry James” is less a confession of laziness than a declaration of temperament. The “And” is doing sly work: it suggests we’ve entered mid-conversation, as if the speaker is cutting through the polite rituals of literary admiration to say what people often think but won’t admit. It’s a refusal of duty-reading, the kind of cultural homework that turns taste into moral credential.

Henry James, shorthand for psychological intricacy and syntactic corridors you can get lost in, becomes a symbol of a certain prestige tradition: slow, mannered, socially coded. MacCaig’s poetry, by contrast, is famous for clarity, speed, and the shock of the concrete - often rooted in Scottish landscape and speech. So “impossible” doesn’t just mean “I get bored.” It implies a mismatch between forms of attention. James asks you to inhabit ambiguity for pages; MacCaig’s best lines snap a perception into focus and then move on. The subtext is: my mind won’t collaborate with that kind of elegance.

There’s also a cultural politics humming underneath. A Scottish poet naming an apex English-language novelist reads like a gentle anti-deference: the canon isn’t a mountain you must climb to be legitimate. He’s staking out a right to preference, even provinciality, without apology. The wit is how bluntly he frames it - impossibility, not mere dislike - turning a personal limit into an aesthetic stance.