Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Creeley

Creeley is taking a scalpel to the cozy myth of belonging: that a social group automatically provides solace. His punchline is brutal in its plainness - everyone feels the same alienation, yet the feeling remains privately endured, unshared, almost unspeakable. The irony is structural, not just emotional. A group can multiply loneliness because it normalizes performance: you learn the script of the room, then discover the script has no lines for what you actually feel.

The nod to Pound is doing heavy lifting. Pound, the modernist evangelist of precision and hard edges, also became a cautionary tale about genius curdling into obsession and ideological wreckage. Creeley borrows Pound's imperative tone ("great emphasis") but redirects it inward, away from manifestos and toward a simple, almost comic practicality: the way out is via the door. It's a tautology that lands like advice and indictment at once. If the situation is intolerable, leave; if you cannot leave, admit what holds you there.

Context matters: Creeley, a central figure in postwar American poetry (Black Mountain, the aesthetics of breath and line), specialized in pared-down speech that carries relational pressure - the unsaid, the misfire, the social wince. Here, the "door" reads as both literal exit and poetic method: stop theorizing your isolation, stop romanticizing the group's melancholy, take the smallest honest action. The subtext is a challenge to the reader and to artists alike: don't confuse shared despair with intimacy, and don't mistake talking around pain for company.