Art & Creativity Quote by Norman MacCaig

A poet admitting he’d “throw them out” if he didn’t “like [them] very much” sounds blunt, even a little brutal, but it’s really a manifesto about attention. MacCaig isn’t talking about tidiness; he’s staking a claim against the pious idea that books deserve automatic reverence. In a culture where owning shelves of worthy titles can double as moral signaling, he tilts the conversation back toward pleasure, impact, and re-reading - the lived relationship with language, not the abstract virtue of being “well read.”

The phrasing matters. “Only keep” implies a private canon, a winnowing. “Very much” raises the bar: not “important,” not “educational,” but felt. It’s the poet’s standard for survival - a book stays because it continues to give, to spark, to unsettle. “Throw them out” is comic hyperbole with an edge, a deliberately vulgar verb for a supposedly refined object. That clash punctures literary sanctimony and reminds you that a book is also an object taking up space; the mind, like a room, can be cluttered by obligations.

Contextually, MacCaig wrote in a 20th-century Britain where literature carried heavy institutional weight - syllabi, prizes, gatekeepers. His line reads as resistance to that apparatus, favoring an intimate, sensory economy of reading. The subtext is a quiet dare: if you’re keeping books out of guilt, whose library is it, really?