Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

Strand turns the romantic myth of the poet into an image of clerical overload: stacks of submissions, not muses on mountaintops. The first clause is almost bureaucratically deadpan - "vast", "many", "can be surmised" - as if poetry’s emotional chaos could be audited. That dry tone is the point. He’s talking about poems the way an editor or judge has to: not as singular cries of the soul, but as sheer volume, as an institutional fact.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, it’s a quietly generous admission that the urge to write poetry is widespread and irreducible; people arrive for grief, ambition, ego, wonder, loneliness, or a need to make a mark. On the other, Strand hints at the anonymity and sameness that the slush pile produces. When you’re staring at towers of paper, individual intention becomes a statistic. The line "that much can be surmised" suggests how little you can truly know about those reasons from the poems alone, or from the act of submission, which converts private need into a public bid.

Context matters: Strand lived inside the machinery of literary culture - prizes, journals, teaching, the whole mid-to-late-20th-century ecosystem where poets are made and vetted. The quote catches poetry at its most unglamorous interface with modern life: the inbox. It works because it refuses both contempt and sentimentality, letting the stacks stand as evidence of desire, and of the quiet brutality of being one page among thousands.