Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

The line draws a clean, almost mischievous boundary between accessibility and complacency. “Readable, yes. Easy, no” is a poet’s refusal to be flattened into content: something you scroll past, instantly “get,” and instantly forget. Murray is staking out a middle position that’s rarer than it sounds. He’s not embracing obscurity for its own sake; he’s resisting the market pressure that treats difficulty as a design flaw.

The word “easy” does extra work here. It’s not just about syntactic simplicity or plain diction. It hints at emotional convenience: poems that reassure, that arrive pre-chewed, that let the reader stay unchanged. By rejecting “easy,” Murray is also rejecting the kind of cultural performance where artists must be palatable, agreeable, and endlessly legible. “Anymore” suggests a pivot point: experience has taught him that being “easy” earns approval at the cost of ambition, and possibly at the cost of honesty.

The subtext is a dare, but a fair one. Readable means he still believes in the reader; he’s not locking the door and calling it art. He’s asking for active attention, the kind we’re trained out of by frictionless interfaces and constant summarizing. In a moment when clarity is often confused with shallowness and complexity is dismissed as elitism, Murray makes a sharper claim: difficulty can be ethical. It can be the form that respects reality’s mess, and respects the reader enough not to lie about it.