Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds is staking out a fiercely embodied theory of art: the poet as instrument, not oracle. In two plainspoken sentences, she pulls the mystique off “inspiration” and replaces it with physiology. “I think this is true for all artists” reads like generosity, but it’s also a quiet provocation. She’s daring you to accept that craft begins not in lofty ideas but in the sensorium: touch, smell, appetite, recoil. The universalizing move isn’t grand; it’s strategic. By widening the claim to “all artists,” she frames sensory attention as the baseline requirement of making, not a quirky personal method.

The second line tightens the screw: “My senses are very important to me.” The repetition of “me” lands like a refusal to be abstracted. Olds, whose work often courts the intimate and the bodily, is signaling allegiance to perception as ethics. To take senses seriously is to take experience seriously, including the experiences culture prefers to euphemize - sex, aging, illness, domestic brutality, desire. There’s subtextual defiance here against traditions that sanitize poetry into tasteful metaphor. She’s saying: the raw data matters; don’t ask me to launder it.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century American poetry lineage that re-privatized the lyric without turning it coy: confessional, yes, but disciplined by concrete detail. Olds isn’t romanticizing sensitivity; she’s naming it as workload. Attention becomes the engine, and the body becomes the archive.