Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Broughton

There is a quiet rebellion tucked into Broughton’s line: a refusal to treat gloom as the only respectable entry point into art. “Most poets” nods to a familiar cultural script - the moody prodigy, the prestige of suffering, the idea that seriousness has to look like despair. By calling it “adolescent sadness,” he doesn’t just describe a phase; he deflates it. The phrase has a faintly amused edge, as if he’s seen that posture up close and recognizes it as partly sincere, partly performed.

The turn is in “begin” versus “end.” Broughton isn’t shaming the early darkness; he’s insisting the artistic arc matters. The claim isn’t that gladness is easier, but that it’s “more rewarding” - a word that frames happiness as earned labor rather than default cheer. That’s the subtext: joy as craft, as discipline, as an aesthetic choice made after you’ve metabolized the world’s bruises.

Context sharpens it. Broughton was a filmmaker and poet associated with mid-century experimental, queer-adjacent bohemian culture, where melancholy could be both genuine and fashionable, and where public optimism often read as naïve. In that milieu, choosing gladness is an act of taste and defiance. The line also reads like late-life testimony: the artist looking back at the romance of youthful misery and deciding it’s a poor long-term muse.

It works because it doesn’t preach. It lightly punctures the cult of the tortured artist, then offers an alternative that still respects complexity: not denial, but a deliberate ending.