"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it"
About this Quote
The sting in Baker's line is that it flatters poetry and indicts its gatekeepers in the same breath. "So vital to us" sets poetry up not as a decorative art but as a basic human instrument: the compressed language we reach for when ordinary speech fails. Then comes the turn - "until" - a little word that turns a love story into a crime report. The culprit isn't adulthood, technology, or short attention spans. It's school.
As a journalist, Baker is allergic to official pieties, and he aims that skepticism at the classroom's habit of turning living texts into compliance exercises. The subtext is familiar: poetry arrives to many people first as memorization, annotation, and quizzes about "what the author meant", as if meaning were a password. The experience becomes less like hearing music and more like being audited. Poetry, which depends on ambiguity, voice, and emotional risk, gets handled like a dead specimen pinned to a board.
Baker is also doing something craftily American here: defending the private self against institutional overreach. He implies we start with an intuitive appetite for rhythm, metaphor, and intensity - the way kids chant, joke, invent. School "spoils" it by making the encounter public, graded, and anxious, replacing pleasure with performance and curiosity with fear of being wrong.
The context is a lifetime spent watching institutions professionalize everything. Baker's barb isn't anti-education; it's anti-reduction. He's arguing that poetry survives when it's treated as an experience, not a credential.
As a journalist, Baker is allergic to official pieties, and he aims that skepticism at the classroom's habit of turning living texts into compliance exercises. The subtext is familiar: poetry arrives to many people first as memorization, annotation, and quizzes about "what the author meant", as if meaning were a password. The experience becomes less like hearing music and more like being audited. Poetry, which depends on ambiguity, voice, and emotional risk, gets handled like a dead specimen pinned to a board.
Baker is also doing something craftily American here: defending the private self against institutional overreach. He implies we start with an intuitive appetite for rhythm, metaphor, and intensity - the way kids chant, joke, invent. School "spoils" it by making the encounter public, graded, and anxious, replacing pleasure with performance and curiosity with fear of being wrong.
The context is a lifetime spent watching institutions professionalize everything. Baker's barb isn't anti-education; it's anti-reduction. He's arguing that poetry survives when it's treated as an experience, not a credential.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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