Art & Creativity Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds drops the polite mask with that clipped, almost offhand “There are some fine books and essays about that,” then drives the knife in: a culture that “gives its writers” a role and then “encourag[es] them to die.” The intent isn’t to romanticize the doomed-poet myth; it’s to indict the social machinery that keeps it profitable. By pointing to Lewis Hyde (a writer known for treating art as a kind of economy of gifts and obligations), she frames alcoholism not as a private defect but as a negotiated arrangement between the artist and the audience: we reward the performance of extremity, then act shocked when it becomes terminal.

The subtext is about complicity. “Society gives its writers” makes the arrangement sound ceremonial, like pinning a medal. But the “role” here is closer to a costume stitched from stereotypes: the tortured genius, the brilliant mess, the charismatic wreck. Olds suggests the bargain is structurally coercive. If you want to be legible as a “real” writer, the culture nudges you toward self-destruction because it makes better stories, sharper branding, cleaner archetypes. It’s an ethics problem disguised as taste.

Context matters: Olds emerged in a late-20th-century American poetry world that both prized confessional intensity and pathologized it. Her line is a refusal of the spectator sport around suffering. She’s not denying that pain can fuel art; she’s asking why we keep building a stage where the most marketable ending is an early death.