Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

About this Quote

A good poem doesn’t show up with a mission statement. Marilyn Hacker’s line is a small act of resistance against the cultural pressure to make art useful, improving, and easily summarized. “I don’t know” is doing real work here: it’s not uncertainty so much as a refusal to play the game where poems are evaluated like self-help tools, moral lessons, or political pamphlets. She sidesteps the demand that a poem “help to develop something” - a phrase that sounds like grant language, workshop talk, even branding - and reasserts the poem as an autonomous object, answerable first to its own internal logic.

The pivot is her emphasis on “there for itself.” Hacker, known for formal rigor and intellectual range, isn’t arguing for airy aestheticism; she’s staking out a boundary. If a poem is built to deliver a predetermined takeaway, the reader becomes a consumer of conclusions. Hacker wants the opposite: the reader as co-maker. “For what the reader finds in it” shifts authority away from the author’s intent and toward encounter, interpretation, and lived context. Meaning isn’t extracted like a nugget; it’s produced in the friction between text and reader.

The subtext is quietly democratic and quietly demanding. The poem doesn’t have to justify its existence, but the reader has to show up with attention. In an era that prizes “impact,” Hacker defends a different kind of value: not utility, but depth; not instruction, but discovery.

Quote Details

Topic	Poetry

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About the Author

Marilyn Hacker (born November 27, 1942) is a Poet from USA.

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