Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

MacCaig’s dismissal lands with the bluntness of a man defending poetry’s right to be felt, not merely decoded. Calling certain contemporaries “absolute baloney” isn’t just cranky taste-making; it’s a deliberate puncture of mid-century avant-garde prestige, the kind that can turn difficulty into a badge of seriousness. His target (misnamed here but clearly gesturing at Charles Olson and the postwar experimental scene) stands for a poetry that often foregrounds method: projective breath, fractured syntax, intellectual scaffolding. MacCaig admits the respectable posture first: curiosity, openness, the good-faith desire to understand “what they were up to.” Then he withdraws the only credential he ultimately cares about: being moved.

That phrase “true poetry” is doing quiet polemical work. It suggests an ethical line, not just an aesthetic preference: the poem should earn its strangeness by enlarging perception, not by staging obscurity as virtue. MacCaig’s own writing, shaped by Scottish landscapes and a hard-won clarity, tends to distrust self-mythologizing literary movements. The subtext is that a poem can be innovative and still emotionally legible; innovation that bypasses the nerves becomes performance.

Context matters: postwar Britain watched American experimental currents arrive with institutional momentum, and the pressure to keep up could feel like a forced march. MacCaig’s refusal reads less as anti-modernist stubbornness than as a defense of a different modernism - one where precision, wit, and human charge outweigh theory.