Education Quote by James Schuyler

Gratitude, yes, but also a quiet insistence on pleasure as a legitimate artistic metric. Schuyler’s line is almost disarmingly mild: “pleasant,” “learn,” “takes an interest.” Nothing here performs the grand posture of the Poet seeking immortality. He frames attention as news that arrives after the fact, not as a demand the writer makes in advance. That’s a very New York School kind of modesty: art as lived experience, not as monument, with the social world drifting in and out of the poem’s weather.

The subtext is slyly defensive. Schuyler doesn’t say it’s pleasant that someone praises the work, or even understands it. Interest is enough. For a poet often read as intimate, observant, and lightly conversational, “interest” signals the kind of readership he’s actually after: curious, alert, willing to sit with small perceptions without forcing them to become “important.” The sentence is also a gentle corrective to the culture of difficulty and credentialed interpretation. He’s not asking to be decoded; he’s glad to be accompanied.

Then there’s the second clause, the one that shifts the center of gravity: “a work which one enjoyed writing.” He quietly elevates the making over the reception. The poem’s first audience is the poet’s own attention, his own enjoyment; any later interest is a bonus, pleasantly confirming that private delight can travel. In a literary economy that often treats publication as proof of seriousness, Schuyler’s intent feels almost radical: the work justifies itself at the moment of its making, and community begins with something as simple as someone leaning in.