Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

MacCaig’s line lands like a dry shrug from a poet who knows exactly what he’s supposed to be revering - and refuses to fake it. “Long long works” reads as both complaint and parody: the doubled adjective gently mocks the solemn prestige attached to bigness in literature. He isn’t making a grand moral argument about attention spans; he’s puncturing the piety around endurance as a cultural virtue.

The intent is two-pronged. First, it’s a canny acknowledgement of a real shift in readership: modern life crowds out the kind of slow, devotional reading that “great” doorstops demand. Second, and sharper, is the self-incrimination: “which I share.” That pivot dismantles the usual artist-versus-philistine posture. MacCaig won’t let the poet stand outside the audience, scolding. He implicates himself in the same impatience, the same desire for immediacy, and in doing so he buys credibility. It’s a rhetorical move that feels almost conversational, but it’s also strategically disarming; if the poet admits he, too, gets bored, the reader is freed from guilt.

Contextually, MacCaig’s career sits in a 20th-century British poetry ecosystem that increasingly valued compression and clarity over Victorian sprawl. The subtext is a defense of the short form as serious art, not a downgrade. He’s arguing - with wit rather than manifesto - that concision isn’t a concession to laziness; it’s an aesthetic choice suited to the moment and, frankly, to human nature.