Time & Perspective Quote by James Schuyler

Schuyler’s refusal to gloss his own poems isn’t coy modesty; it’s a defense of poetry as an object with its own weather. The line “a poem is what it is” sounds blunt, almost anti-theoretical, but it’s doing something sophisticated: it insists that the poem’s meaning isn’t a detachable “message” you can paraphrase without loss. Calling the poem “itself a definition” flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of words defining the world, the poem defines its own terms of experience - its tone, its attention, its odd angles of feeling - and that definition lives in form, pacing, and selection, not in an author’s after-action report.

The subtext is also institutional. Schuyler, associated with the New York School, wrote amid a midcentury culture that increasingly asked poets to supply explanatory commentary: interviews, statements of poetics, program notes. His pushback reads like a quiet resistance to the professionalization of “access” - the idea that a work should arrive with a user manual. When he warns that redefining a poem can “falsify it,” he’s naming how authorial explanation can harden what is deliberately porous, turning a living set of impressions into a single sanctioned takeaway.

The last clause lands with a humane sting: the author is least objective. Not because poets are unreliable narrators in some moral sense, but because they’re too close to the contingencies - the drafts, the private motives, the accidents - that a finished poem has already transformed. Schuyler is protecting the reader’s right to meet the poem on equal footing, without the author leaning over your shoulder to tell you what you’re “supposed” to see.