Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Koch

Scarcity is doing a lot of work here: Koch makes poetry sound less like a bustling democracy and more like an ecosystem with a few apex predators. The line has the casual shrug of dinner-table candor, but it’s a provocation aimed at two audiences at once: the gatekeepers who want literature to feel measurable, and the aspirants who want genius to feel attainable.

“Maybe” is the sly lever. It softens the claim into something almost conversational, even modest, while smuggling in a ruthless premise about reputation and endurance. Koch isn’t offering a statistic; he’s staging a mood. The phrase “three or four” is deliberately blunt, a number small enough to sting but not precise enough to be falsified. It reads like a seasoned insider’s estimate, the kind you’re supposed to recognize as true because it’s impolite to say out loud.

Context matters: Koch comes out of the New York School, a scene built on community, performance, and a certain anti-monument seriousness. From that vantage, this line doubles as both skepticism and satire. It punctures the workshop-era fantasy that talent can be reliably produced on schedule, yet it also pokes at the machinery that decides who counts as “really good” in the first place: reviews, prizes, institutional patronage, the slow churn of anthologies.

The subtext is a dare. If only a handful will be remembered, the question isn’t merely who writes well, but who manages to sound inevitable to their time - and whose peers, editors, and critics help make that inevitability stick.