Love Quote by Norman MacCaig

There’s a sly shrug built into “I used to.” MacCaig isn’t just reporting a change in taste; he’s dramatizing a poet’s hard-won independence from the prestige economy of literature. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy arrive as “the big boys,” a phrase that miniaturizes giants without denying their size. It’s affectionate, but it’s also a demotion: the canon becomes a clubhouse, the revered masters recast as hulking adolescents of “the last century,” impressive and faintly overbearing.

The line works because it refuses the pieties that often cling to high culture. MacCaig is Scottish, modern, and temperamentally suspicious of grand systems. Russian novels offer total worlds: spiritual crisis, social theory, moral extremity, pages that feel like weather. A poet like MacCaig, known for clarity and the compression of lived detail, is implicitly choosing a different scale of truth. His past “great love” reads like a youthful romance with maximalism, the phase where seriousness is measured by word count and suffering is the ticket to profundity.

Subtext: reverence can be real and still outgrown. The quote doesn’t dunk on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; it marks the moment a writer stops needing them as proof of ambition. There’s also a quiet generational note. A 20th-century poet who lived through war, cultural upheaval, and the tightening of modern life is signaling that the 19th-century “big boys” may no longer be the only yardstick for depth. The intent is self-positioning: MacCaig carving space for a poetry of precision over sprawl, and for admiration that doesn’t require lifelong submission.