Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

MacCaig’s line lands like a shrug with a blade in it: the setup is tidy and academic, the punchline is refusal. “And the second question” evokes the classroom ritual of enumerated problems, as if poetry were a unit to be mastered after lunch. Then he detonates that posture with “I didn’t think so,” a phrase that sounds polite until you notice how final it is. The wit is in the anticlimax. He doesn’t argue; he undercuts the premise that poetry belongs to the same universe as teachable competencies.

The intent isn’t anti-learning so much as anti-institutional certainty. MacCaig, a Scottish poet who spent years teaching, knew the difference between training and transmission. You can teach craft, attention, reading habits, the history of forms. What you can’t “teach” is the internal voltage that makes a line feel inevitable, or the private stubbornness that keeps someone revising when no one’s grading it. His short dismissal performs that belief: it refuses to dress mystery up as method.

Subtext: the anxiety of professionalized art. Mid-20th-century literary culture increasingly tied poetry to universities, workshops, syllabi - systems that promise access and accountability. MacCaig’s sentence resists the commodification of inspiration without romanticizing ignorance. It’s a warning against confusing proximity to poems with possession of the impulse that makes them. The charm is how he makes that warning sound like common sense, as if the whole debate were slightly silly - which, for him, it is.