Art & Creativity Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker draws a line between the healing she has received from poems and the impulse to write with healing as a goal. The distinction guards poetry from becoming a tool or a prescription. When the act of writing is harnessed to a desired outcome, the poem is likely to turn didactic, sentimental, or manipulative; craft becomes subordinate to utility, and the language stiffens. Healing, in her view, is not an intention but an emergent property of a poem that has been true to its own demands.

That stance fits a poet known for rigorous formal control and ethical seriousness. Hacker often writes within sonnets, ghazals, and other structures while addressing grief, illness, sexuality, and politics. The pressure of lived experience meets the pressure of form, and meaning arises from that tension. If the poet tries to steer the result toward therapeutic effect, the poem loses the unpredictability and resistance that make art alive. It becomes a message rather than an encounter.

There is also a shift of agency here. Healing, when it happens, belongs to the reader, or to the writer as an aftereffect, not as a product assembled on demand. A poem that invites healing does so by honoring complexity, not simplifying it for comfort. It makes space for the contradictions of pain and consolation, and it does that through attention to image, rhythm, argument, and music, not by offering solace as a thesis.

The claim is not anti-therapeutic; it is anti-instrumental. Poetry may console or transform because it is accurate to experience and alive to language. The task is to write the most exact, risky, formally attentive poem possible and to let any healing occur as a consequence of that fidelity. By refusing to aim at remedy, Hacker defends the poem’s integrity and, paradoxically, protects the conditions under which it can do real human work.