Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Hacker lands the punch with a neat bit of misdirection: she starts from mourning ("eliminated as a literary genre") and swerves into parody ("spiritual aerobic exercise"). The joke is acidic because it’s plausible. She’s not only lamenting poetry’s marginal status in the marketplace; she’s skewering what replaces it when a culture stops treating poems as crafted objects meant to be read closely, argued over, and judged.

The phrase "installed instead" is doing institutional work. Poetry hasn’t just faded; it’s been rebranded, upgraded into a lifestyle accessory. "Spiritual aerobic" is a perfect jab at the self-improvement ethos: breath, release, catharsis, a little sweat, then back to your day. In that world, the point isn’t language under pressure, or tradition, or risk. The point is personal wellness, and the metric is participation, not attention. "Nobody need read it" is the bleakest line here, because it names the quiet collapse of readership: poems as content that circulates without being encountered, admired without being understood, praised without being tested.

"Anybody can do it" isn’t simple elitism; it’s a defense of standards. Hacker, steeped in formal rigor and political seriousness, is warning about a democracy of expression that forgets the other half of art: the demanding, communal practice of reception. If poetry becomes a private exercise, it can’t do what it’s historically done at its best - sharpen public language, preserve complexity, and make shared meaning out of experience rather than merely vent it.