"And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written"
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Strand’s line is a minor miracle of restraint: it starts with a shrugging “And yet,” then quietly indicts an entire way of life. The surprise isn’t that people read poetry; it’s that they bother to make it at all in a culture trained to want what’s easy, quick, and purchasable. “Material comforts” and “immediate gratification” aren’t just lifestyle descriptors here, they’re rival philosophies of attention. Strand frames contemporary entertainment as a kind of addiction, a word that does more than scold. It suggests compulsion, tolerance, the need for ever-stronger doses of stimulation - and therefore a shrinking capacity for the slow, ambiguous pleasures poetry requires.
The sentence also flatters poetry without romanticizing it. Strand doesn’t claim poets are saints resisting temptation. He simply notes the persistence of an art form that, by market logic, shouldn’t be flourishing. That’s the subtext: poetry is an irrational practice in a rationalized culture. It doesn’t scale, it doesn’t deliver predictable rewards, and it can’t be optimized for frictionless consumption. So why does it keep getting written? Because the human mind, even when pampered and entertained to exhaustion, still produces surplus feeling and unanswered questions. Poetry becomes the form that metabolizes what comfort can’t cure.
Context matters: Strand came up in the postwar American boom and lived into the era of television saturation and early digital distraction. The line reads less like nostalgia than astonishment - a poet watching poetry survive the very conditions that were supposed to make it obsolete.
The sentence also flatters poetry without romanticizing it. Strand doesn’t claim poets are saints resisting temptation. He simply notes the persistence of an art form that, by market logic, shouldn’t be flourishing. That’s the subtext: poetry is an irrational practice in a rationalized culture. It doesn’t scale, it doesn’t deliver predictable rewards, and it can’t be optimized for frictionless consumption. So why does it keep getting written? Because the human mind, even when pampered and entertained to exhaustion, still produces surplus feeling and unanswered questions. Poetry becomes the form that metabolizes what comfort can’t cure.
Context matters: Strand came up in the postwar American boom and lived into the era of television saturation and early digital distraction. The line reads less like nostalgia than astonishment - a poet watching poetry survive the very conditions that were supposed to make it obsolete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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