Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary MacLane

MacLane’s line lands like a dare dressed up as a bookish aside. “Of poets I put Virgil first” isn’t just a ranking; it’s a declaration of taste as identity, the kind of taste that insists on being taken seriously in a culture that often treated ambitious women’s seriousness as a pose. Then she tightens the screw with the blunt add-on: “he was greatest.” No hedging, no footnotes, no performative modesty. The certainty is the point.

The specific intent feels less like a contribution to literary criticism than a self-positioning maneuver. By invoking Virgil, MacLane grabs an emblem of canonical authority: the poet of empire, order, and fated narrative. She’s aligning herself with the tradition that had historically excluded voices like hers, almost as if to say: I know the canon, I can speak its passwords, and I won’t apologize for preferring the grand, austere architect of meaning over the softer, more “acceptable” sentiments women were expected to cultivate.

The subtext is also theatrical. MacLane’s work often plays with confession, provocation, and self-mythmaking; this kind of crisp verdict reads like a cultivated posture of command. Virgil becomes a proxy for magnitude itself: the desire to be not merely expressive, but consequential. In the early 20th-century climate of moral scrutiny and gendered gatekeeping, that appetite for greatness is the real statement. The line isn’t really about Virgil. It’s about staking a claim to intellectual sovereignty.