Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Baker

There is a wicked precision in the way Baker makes his retreat from “new poetry” sound less like a personal preference than an act of self-preservation. “I gave up” is blunt, almost embarrassed in its finality, but the real blade comes later: the suggestion that contemporary poems have turned into “coded messages” traded by “lonely aliens.” He’s not just accusing poets of difficulty; he’s accusing them of forming a private society that treats obscurity as a credential.

The metaphor does two jobs at once. “Coded” frames modern poetry as encryption: meaning exists, but only for initiates. “Lonely aliens in a hostile world” adds a psychological portrait of the writers and their imagined audience, a tribe speaking to itself because it assumes nobody else will understand or care. That’s Baker’s journalistic sensibility asserting a kind of civic ethic: language should connect, not merely signal membership.

Context matters. Baker came up in mid-century American letters, when mainstream newspapers still assumed a broad public and when modernism’s later institutional afterlife was hardening into workshop style and academic prestige. His quip carries the impatience of a columnist watching art drift away from common readership and toward professionalized taste-making. The subtext is less “poetry is bad now” than “poetry stopped courting the public, then blamed the public for leaving.” It’s a funny line with a serious worry behind it: a culture that can’t share its art starts to lose a shared vocabulary for feeling and argument.