Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Being "in the middle" is usually framed as a compromise: neither the clean beginning nor the victorious end, but the messy stretch where the plot sags and certainty runs out. Marilyn Hacker flips that hierarchy. The satisfaction here isn’t the relief of arrival; it’s the relief of participation. For a poet whose work is steeped in form, politics, and lived texture, the middle is where agency actually happens: where choices accumulate, where the line break matters, where the world is not yet sealed into a moral.

The phrase “something very satisfactory” is deliberately plain, almost domestic. It refuses grand epiphany language, as if to say: don’t romanticize clarity, romanticize process. Subtext: being “in the middle” offers cover from the performance pressure of origins and outcomes. Beginnings demand justification; endings demand judgment. Middles let you be imperfect without being finalized. That’s a deeply writerly stance, but also a political one: movements are mostly middle, mostly unglamorous labor, mostly sustaining attention when the headlines have moved on.

There’s also an erotic and social charge to the wording. “In the middle of something” implies immersion, intimacy, the hum of other bodies and other demands. It suggests a life not curated into neat milestones but crowded with ongoingness. Hacker’s line makes a quiet argument against the culture of wrap-ups and hot takes: satisfaction can come from staying inside the complication long enough to feel its shape.