Daily Inspiration Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s line is a sly little grenade: it’s not just that bureaucrats dislike poetry, it’s that bureaucracy is structurally allergic to what poetry represents. A poem is compact, ambiguous, emotionally precise, and often uncooperative. A bureaucrat, in Vidal’s telling, lives by categories, templates, and the safety of established phrasing. Put them in the same room and the poem becomes a kind of contraband.

The intent is satirical, but not frivolous. Vidal is poking at a very American faith in management: the idea that anything worth doing can be standardized, audited, and explained in a memo. Poetry refuses that bargain. It won’t “clarify deliverables.” It won’t behave. Its meaning can’t be pinned to a single authorized interpretation, which makes it suspect inside systems built to minimize risk and maximize compliance.

The subtext is also personal. Vidal spent decades sparring with institutions that launder power through procedure: Washington politics, media gatekeepers, cultural tastemakers who treat art as a credential rather than a disturbance. By choosing “a bureaucrat” instead of “the government,” he widens the target to a mindset. Bureaucracy isn’t only a building; it’s a way of thinking that mistakes legibility for truth.

Context matters: Vidal wrote and spoke from within the postwar expansion of the administrative state and mass culture, when official language increasingly became the language of public life. The line works because it captures a quiet tragedy: the more a society runs on forms and policies, the more it mistrusts the unruly, intimate speech that tells you what life feels like.