Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

White lands the punch with the lightest touch: a neat little loop of rhyme that doubles as a trap. The line turns on repetition - "starting to review it" comes back like an anxious tic - and in that echo you hear the real target: the critic's mind, already drafting verdicts while the actors are still breathing. It is funny because it is true, and it is sharp because it refuses to be grand about it. White doesn't rant about philistinism or bad faith; he shows a small cognitive failure that looks almost polite, even professional.

The intent is less anti-criticism than anti-premature criticism. White is wary of the way evaluation can colonize attention. The critic isn't malicious; they're busy. They leave at curtain fall and immediately begin manufacturing a coherent story about what happened, which means they were never fully available to the messy, contradictory experience of the play itself. Subtext: criticism can become a performance that competes with the art it claims to serve, and the critic's greatest sin is not harshness but distraction.

Context matters: White, a New Yorker stylist and a master of calibrated understatement, wrote in a media ecosystem that prized quick takes and authoritative voice long before social media made everyone a reviewer. The poem reads like an early warning about the attention economy: when your job is to judge, you start living in the future tense. White's wit exposes the cost - you can win the argument and miss the thing.