Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Young

There is a sly kindness in Marguerite Young's sentence, but it lands like a verdict. She grants writers the desire for "real poetry" almost by default, then swivels to the harder truth: wanting it is common; sustaining it is rare. The key word is sustain. Young isn't talking about a bright line here and there, the accidental perfect stanza, the social-media-able epigram. She's naming poetry as a long-term practice, an endurance sport of attention, revision, and taste.

The phrasing also exposes a professional insecurity writers seldom admit: most of us know what good work looks like, and we even believe we could make it, if only the conditions cooperated. Young punctures that fantasy. "If they could" sounds generous, but it implies inability isn't just bad luck. The barrier is internal as much as external: devotion (the daily, often unglamorous discipline) and talent (the stubborn, unequal distribution of ear, image, and nerve).

Context matters: Young came up in a mid-century literary ecosystem that prized seriousness while rewarding hustle and persona. Her own career, defined by obsessive accumulation and the legendary sprawl of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, makes the line read as self-portrait as much as critique. She isn't romanticizing poetry; she's demystifying it. The subtext is almost ascetic: real poetry demands loyalty to the work over the marketplace, over the ego, over the easy satisfactions of "writerly" noise. Desire is cheap. Devotion and talent are the toll.