Life & Wisdom Quote by James Schuyler

Schuyler’s line lands like a small, cutting kindness: if you can paraphrase a poem into a single prose sentence, you’ve probably mistaken the poem for its “message.” Coming from a New York School poet who prized immediacy, surface pleasures, and the lived texture of attention, it’s also a defense of poetry as an experience rather than an extract.

The intent is partly disciplinary. It swats away the classroom habit of turning poems into moral telegrams, as if the real work were a tidy takeaway you could write on an exam. Schuyler implies that the poem’s value lives in what resists reduction: rhythm, sonic patterning, pacing, ambiguity, the way a line break can create two meanings at once, the emotional weather carried by diction. Prose can report; a poem can stage perception.

The subtext is a quiet argument about power. Summaries flatter the summarizer: they let you feel you’ve “gotten” the poem, mastered it, moved on. Schuyler sides with the opposite stance: receptivity, rereading, a willingness to be slowed down. That posture fits a mid-century moment when poetry was often pressured to justify itself as either high-concept difficulty or clean political statement. Schuyler refuses both as the sole measure.

Context matters, too: postwar American poetry was splitting between confessional narrative, academic formalism, and avant-garde play. Schuyler’s remark is a manifesto in miniature for the last camp: art that earns its keep not by being hard, but by being irreducibly itself. If the poem collapses into one sentence, it wasn’t a poem so much as a memo with line breaks.