Politics & Power Quote by Norman MacCaig

The small cruelty of the second sentence is the point. MacCaig sets up a confession that sounds like admiration - “very interested,” “for many years” - then snaps it shut with “Much less now,” a phrase so flat it becomes funny. It’s the poet’s version of a shrug, but a weaponized one: a clean, deadpan withdrawal that refuses to dramatize itself. The line break between the long courtship and the sudden cooling is where the wit lives.

As a poet writing from Scotland, MacCaig is also quietly sketching a map of influence. “American poetry” can stand in for a mid-century gravitational pull: the big reputations, the exported energies (modernism, confessional intensity, Beat looseness), the sense that the cultural weather system is set somewhere else. His disinterest isn’t necessarily anti-American; it’s anti-hype, anti-imposed hierarchy. The subtext is an artist reclaiming attention as a finite resource, choosing local weather over imported storms.

There’s also a generational undertone. A lifelong reader saying “much less now” hints at fatigue with fashions, schools, and the way literary enthusiasms can harden into obligations. It’s a refusal to keep paying cultural rent just because you once moved in. The comedy is how politely he does it: no manifesto, no name-checking, no scandal. Just a minimal sentence that closes the door and makes you hear it click.