Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Desire is never just appetite in Olson; it is a political instrument that snaps into focus the moment a boundary appears. "We all want what's been suddenly disallowed" compresses a whole anthropology of prohibition into one line: the ban doesn’t merely restrict behavior, it manufactures craving, converts indifference into urgency, and turns private impulse into a collective "we". That plural pronoun is the quiet dagger. Olson isn’t talking about a quirky psychological glitch; he’s naming a crowd effect, the way power produces a shared hunger by drawing a line in public.

The adverb "suddenly" matters as much as "disallowed". A long-standing rule becomes background noise, but an abrupt interdiction feels like theft. It creates the sensation that something was ours a second ago, even if we never cared. In that sense, the line is less about the forbidden fruit than about the speed of the gate slamming shut: scarcity-by-decree, the thrill of contraband, the romance of resistance.

Context helps. Olson’s mid-century America is an ecosystem of new controls and permissions: Cold War paranoia, blacklists, bureaucratic norms, moral panics. A poet associated with Projective Verse, he’s alert to energy in speech, how a sentence can map forces in the world. Here, the force is negative space: authority defines the object by forbidding it. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: if you want to mobilize people, don’t persuade them; prohibit them.