Life & Wisdom Quote by Galway Kinnell

Kinnell’s jab lands because it’s aimed at a familiar literary scam: the way difficulty can masquerade as depth, and clarity can get punished as corny. Coming from a working poet, the line isn’t anti-poetry so much as anti-prestige. He’s skewering the social economy around poems, where the reader’s confusion becomes a status symbol and the poem’s obscurity reads as proof of seriousness. If you can’t paraphrase it, you can still venerate it; if you can, you risk feeling like you’ve unmasked a trick.

The subtext is a small act of self-policing. Poets live inside the temptation to over-mystify, to let “incomprehensible” stand in for inexhaustible. Kinnell suggests that some poems don’t resist understanding because they’re rich, but because they’re undercooked; they hide behind fog the way bad arguments hide behind jargon. At the same time, his second clause cuts the other way: when a poem is fully “understood,” it can feel ridiculous because poetry isn’t built to be solved like a riddle. A perfectly extractable “meaning” can collapse the experience into a slogan, exposing how much of poetry’s force depends on tone, music, and ambiguity that can’t be translated without loss.

Context matters: Kinnell, a mid-century American poet associated with the deep-image, postconfessional era, wrote poems that are visceral, ethical, and narrative-minded. His complaint reads like a defense of embodiment against academicized opacity - and a warning that the real test of profundity is what survives comprehension, not what dodges it.