Politics & Power Quote by Marguerite Young

Young is drawing a hard boundary around what counts as serious art: the “poetic novel” isn’t just lyrical prose or heightened perception, it’s language that knows who pays for the view. Her insistence reads like a rebuke to the old fantasy of the novelist as a purely aesthetic creature, above the grubby world of power. For Young, poetry without politics is decoration; politics is the pressure system that gives lyricism its stakes.

The phrasing matters. “I don’t believe” signals conviction without sermonizing, a personal credo rather than a manifesto. Then she tightens the screw: “cannot” makes it structural, not optional. Political consciousness isn’t a theme you add; it’s the awareness that shapes what you notice, what you omit, whose interiority you treat as worthy of music. The subtext is an ethics of attention: the novel’s “poetic” charge comes from registering social reality with sensitivity, and social reality is organized by class, labor, gender, race, and institutions whether the writer wants it or not.

Young’s second sentence (“I have a strong political conscience”) turns the claim inward. She’s not only describing an artistic principle; she’s locating herself as accountable, suggesting that style is a moral decision. In mid-century American letters, where “art for art’s sake” prestige and Cold War suspicion of overt politics both shaped reception, this is also a kind of defiance. Young stakes her legitimacy on a fusion many gatekeepers tried to separate: beauty with a backbone, lyricism that refuses to be innocent.