Time & Perspective Quote by Craig Raine

A line like this lands with the stern clarity of a manifesto, but its real bite is in the word “simple.” Craig Raine, a poet known for defamiliarization and crisp, angled observation, is deliberately baiting the reader: the job is “simple” only in the way a tightrope is “just walking.” He frames originality not as a mood or a brand, but as an ethical demand. “Uncompromisingly” turns creativity into a refusal - of trends, of safe competence, of inherited forms that keep paying out social approval.

The subtext is a quiet swipe at two common escapes artists take. One is reverence: treating the past as a museum you can live inside. The other is careerism: making work that fits neatly into whatever the moment is already rewarding. Raine’s formulation doesn’t romanticize suffering or inspiration; it treats art as reconnaissance. “Discover” implies investigation, attention, risk. You don’t invent the new by wishing for it; you locate the gap the culture is avoiding, then step into it.

Context matters here: late 20th-century British poetry, with its factions and fashions, often rewarded legible voice and social realism on one side, and academic experimentation on the other. Raine’s sentence tries to cut across that terrain. It argues that the only tradition worth serving is the one you extend. The artist’s task isn’t self-expression in the therapeutic sense; it’s adding a previously missing move to the language game - and accepting the loneliness that comes with being first.