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Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

"But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person"

About this Quote

MacCaig’s line has the dry defensiveness of someone batting away a lazy reading: the notion that poems are coded diary entries with a neat set of real-life keys. “You’d have a job” lands like a shrug, half-challenge, half-dismissal, turning the critic into a person rummaging for evidence that isn’t there. It’s witty in that plainspoken Scottish way: colloquial phrasing doing the work of an aesthetic manifesto.

The intent isn’t to deny feeling; it’s to deny ownership. MacCaig is insisting that influence, especially personal influence, doesn’t show up in a poem the way fingerprints show up on glass. The subtext is a warning against biographical reductionism, the impulse to pin every lyric moment on a lover, a friend, a feud. By framing “a particular person” as the thing you’d be “hard-pressed” to locate, he defends the poem as an artifact with its own logic, not a gossip item with line breaks.

Context matters: MacCaig’s work is often rooted in place, observation, and a clipped moral clarity rather than confessional display. In the mid-to-late 20th-century British poetry landscape, with “confessional” modes and personality-driven readings gaining traction, his stance reads like a quiet refusal of the poet-as-celebrity model. The irony is that the statement still sketches a self-portrait: a writer protective of privacy, skeptical of sentimental provenance, committed to transforming experience into something less traceable and more true.

Quote Details

TopicPoetry
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APA Style (7th ed.)
MacCaig, Norman. (2026, January 18). But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-youd-have-a-job-to-find-many-of-my-poems-20953/

Chicago Style
MacCaig, Norman. "But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-youd-have-a-job-to-find-many-of-my-poems-20953/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/but-youd-have-a-job-to-find-many-of-my-poems-20953/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig (November 14, 1910 - January 23, 1996) was a Poet from Scotland.

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