Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

A poet admitting he keeps the “obviously unintended” is quietly detonating the myth of total authorial control. Murray’s line frames craft less as domination than as consent: the writer doesn’t manufacture every spark so much as recognize which accidents have the right kind of voltage. The phrase “do try” is doing crucial work here. It suggests discipline, not mysticism. Letting something “stay in” isn’t laziness; it’s an active resistance to the reflex to polish away anything that wasn’t planned.

The subtext is a critique of workshop culture’s obsession with intention-as-alibi. In many contemporary literary spaces, you’re expected to account for every choice, to annotate your own instincts on demand. Murray pushes back with a deceptively modest standard: if a surprise arrives “naturally good,” it earns citizenship in the final draft. “Obviously unintended” also implies that the text itself can betray the author, revealing pressures and preoccupations the poet hasn’t consciously named yet. Instead of treating that betrayal as an error, he treats it as evidence.

Contextually, this feels rooted in how poems actually get made: through mishearings, slip-ups, line breaks that land better than they “should,” metaphors that wandered in from the subconscious. The sentence is both permission and warning. Permission to honor the gift of the draft; warning that over-intention can sterilize a poem into competence. Murray’s ethic is simple: keep the living thing, even if you can’t take credit for it.