Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

A poet asking for the devil's advocate is really asking for pressure: not agreement, not comfort, but the kind of friction that forces a mind to show its work. In Olson's mouth, the line has the clipped, almost stage-directions feel of midcentury American intellectual life, when conversation doubled as sparring and sincerity was often suspect unless it survived cross-examination. "I hope" softens the demand into etiquette, but it also carries a dare: if you're here, don't play the agreeable friend; play the necessary antagonist.

The subtext is less about Satan than about method. "Devil's advocate" is a social role that grants permission to say the unsayable without being fully owned by it. Olson, a poet invested in scale, breath, and the raw mechanics of thought, would be drawn to any device that keeps language from settling into slogan. The phrase implies an argument already in motion - a room with stakes, a point of view at risk of becoming doctrine.

There's also a small, telling anxiety inside it: the fear of consensus. To ask for a devil's advocate is to admit that a group can drift toward the easy yes, the shared vibe, the premature conclusion. Olson's hope is a defense against that drift. It's a request for someone to contaminate certainty, to keep the poem-or the idea, the politics, the project-from turning into mere self-approval. In that sense, it's not cynicism so much as an ethic: opposition as a form of care.