Love Quote by Diane Wakoski

The line flatters and needles in the same breath: our current romance with “the Irish” isn’t just about politics, ancestry, or tourism, Wakoski suggests, but about a sound we’ve decided to hear as enchanting because it arrives wrapped in time. “Sometimes” does quiet but important work here. It implies she’s resisting a single tidy explanation while still pointing to a pattern: the appeal isn’t Irishness-as-essence; it’s Irishness-as-performance, specifically the performance of linguistic “archaism” when spoken aloud.

“Archaism” is a high-voltage word for a poet. It names language that feels older than the room it’s in, carrying residues of other centuries. In speech, that can register as charm, wit, musicality, even moral authority. Wakoski’s subtext is that listeners project longing onto the cadence: we want a past that feels more textured than the present, and a voice that seems to have escaped the flattening pressures of mass media English. Loving “the Irish today” becomes a form of cultural consumerism, an attraction to the aesthetic of history.

The phrasing also risks a deliberate essentialism: “we are all in love” is obviously untrue, which makes it revealing. She’s sketching a dominant mood, a fashion in sentiment. Read in the context of late-20th-century and onward Irish cultural visibility - from literature and poetry to stage accents, pub mythology, and the export of “authentic” storytelling - the quote catches how a people can be romanticized through their verbal texture. Wakoski, as a poet, is less praising that texture than exposing the audience’s desire to be seduced by it.