Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

There is a sly double move in Marilyn Hacker's line: a tourist-brochure opener that immediately refuses the brochure. "Paris is a wonderful city" lands like the safest sentence in the world, the kind of consensus praise that asks nothing of the speaker. Then she swivels: "I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community". The pivot isn't just biographical; it's political in the small-p sense of how a life is arranged. "Anglophone" is the key choice. It's not "English-speaking friends" (warm, intimate), but a sociolinguistic label that implies institutions, scenes, and invisible borders. Hacker is talking about belonging as infrastructure.

The intent reads like a correction to an assumption: if you imagine an expatriate poet in Paris as an English-language island, she punctures that fantasy. The subtext is that language isn't a neutral medium; it's a membership card. Not "especially" is doing quiet work too, admitting some connection to English while signaling that her daily affiliations, influences, and solidarities aren't primarily routed through it. For a poet, that matters. Poetry is hypersensitive to where a word comes from, what it touches, which accents it carries; choosing not to center an anglophone community is an aesthetic stance as much as a social one.

Contextually, Hacker's career sits in the long tradition of writers in Paris, but the quote resists the classic expat myth (Paris as stage-set for anglophone genius). She frames Paris less as backdrop and more as a linguistic ecosystem she actually lives in, where "wonderful" is real, but belonging is negotiated, not inherited.