Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Young

Young’s sentence cuts like a polite literary insult: realism, in her view, isn’t a brave plunge into the world but a fallback position for writers who can’t justify their flights. The jab is aimed at “poetic writers” who sprinkle in gritty, documentary detail as if a few scuffed shoes and unwashed dishes will certify seriousness. For Young, realism isn’t a seasoning; it’s a worldview. Without a governing philosophy, those “passages of realism” don’t anchor the work. They read as nervous concessions to respectability, little proofs of adulthood inserted into otherwise lyric or visionary prose.

The key verb is “revert.” It frames realism as default mode, the cultural baseline you slide back into when imagination, symbolism, or spiritual ambition loses its nerve. That’s a pointed diagnosis of literary fashion: modern writing often treats realism as the honest register and anything more ornate as suspect, indulgent, “untrue.” Young flips the prestige hierarchy. The problem isn’t realism itself; it’s realism used as a credential rather than a chosen aesthetic with metaphysical stakes.

Contextually, Young is writing from a 20th-century America that elevated social observation and psychological plausibility, while simultaneously flirting with modernist experimentation. Her line defends the big, risky project: prose that can be poetic without apologizing, and that understands “realism” as more than accurate surfaces. Subtext: if you’re going to invoke reality, you’d better know what you think it’s for.