Fatherhood Quote by Roger McGough

McGough sketches a quiet manifesto for what a live poetry reading should do: deliver uplift without cheap laughs, consolation without pretending grief is tidy. The key move is his insistence on people leaving “feeling better” while the material might be a father dying or the vulnerability of raising young children. That apparent contradiction is the point. He’s arguing that catharsis, not comedy, is the engine of relief.

The subtext is a defense of seriousness in a culture that often demands performance value above emotional truth. McGough knows the modern room: audiences primed by stand-up cadence, spoken-word energy, the quick hit of relatability. He doesn’t reject humor as much as he refuses to let it be the main metric of success. “Not because you’ve done a comedy performance” reads like a gentle jab at the way poets can be pressured to act like entertainers to justify the ticket price.

Context matters: McGough came up in the Liverpool poets scene, where accessibility and wit were never enemies of depth. He’s always been a populist poet in the best sense - clear diction, everyday subjects, a belief that poems belong to public life. Here, he’s drawing a line between being liked and being felt. The “soul” language risks sentimentality, but he earns it by grounding it in specific, ordinary devastations: death, children, family. The reading becomes a temporary community of recognition, where the audience feels better not because the world got lighter, but because it got shared.