Art & Creativity Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Compulsion, not careerism, is the engine Brooks is naming here: writing as a bodily need, not a résumé line. The first clause, "I felt that I had to write", frames art as obligation, almost moral in its pressure. Brooks isn’t romanticizing inspiration; she’s describing a mandate that arrives before external validation. That matters coming from a poet who built a life inside institutions that didn’t reliably reward a Black woman’s interiority, ambition, or experiment. The sentence quietly refuses the marketplace’s power to anoint meaning.

The hinge is "Even if I had never been published". Publication stands in for the whole reward system: prizes, reviews, permission. By hypothesizing its absence, Brooks performs a kind of preemptive liberation. She’s not denying the importance of readers; she’s asserting that the work’s worth can’t be hostage to access. In the mid-century literary world Brooks entered, gatekeeping was real and racialized; this line reads like a private vow against being edited down to what was palatable.

Then she pivots to pleasure and discipline in the same breath: "enjoying it and experiencing the challenge". Enjoyment isn’t treated as unserious; it’s paired with struggle, the part most people omit when they mythologize the artist. Brooks’ intent feels twofold: to demystify the vocation (write because you must, not because you might be chosen) and to reframe difficulty as fuel. The subtext is grit without martyrdom: the work is hard, the work is joyful, and the work continues whether the world is watching or not.