Science & Tech Quote by Roger McGough

Terror, here, is comic misdirection: the computer is not a portal to danger but to abundance. McGough turns the everyday act of powering up into a small apocalypse of culture, where the threat isn’t censorship or silence but the sheer volume of words demanding attention. The joke lands because it’s also true. A poet, of all people, admitting fear of poems punctures the romantic myth that artists are endlessly hungry for their own medium. He’s staging a revolt against the modern assumption that more content equals more life.

The line catches a generational hinge. Born in 1937, McGough spans the shift from scarce, gatekept literary ecosystems to the digital floodplain: online magazines, social feeds, inbox submissions, and the unending scroll of earnestness. The computer becomes both library and conveyor belt, delivering poems without the rituals that once filtered reading: the bookshop, the journal, the sense of arrival. That loss of friction is the subtext. When everything is one click away, attention becomes the true luxury, and taste becomes triage.

There’s also a sly self-protectiveness in the “I’m terrified.” It’s a defense against comparison and psychic overload: if there are “so many poems,” how does any single poem matter, including his? McGough’s wit doesn’t dismiss contemporary poetry; it frames the new anxiety of being a reader in public, permanently behind, always failing to keep up. The punchline isn’t that poems are bad. It’s that poems have become infinite, and infinity is exhausting.