"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words"
About this Quote
Fowles slips a provocation under a compliment: everyone is already composing poetry, whether they admit it or not. The trick is his quiet redefinition of "poems" as something broader than literature - a way of shaping experience into pattern, meaning, and feeling. By the time he adds the kicker ("simply that poets are the ones who write in words"), he has demoted the professional poet from rarefied seer to specialist technician. Not more inspired, just more verbal.
The intent is partly democratizing, partly needling. It flatters the reader (you have an inner lyric life) while also challenging the cultural bureaucracy around art: credentials, gatekeepers, the idea that creativity needs official permission. In Fowles's world - steeped in postwar skepticism and the metafictional games of the 1960s and 70s - authorship is never just authorship. Its a performance of control. This line nudges against that control by suggesting that the raw material of poetry lives outside the page: in memory, desire, moral choice, even the stories people tell themselves to survive.
The subtext is that language is both medium and limitation. Poets are not the only ones living poetically; they are the ones willing (or cursed) to translate the private intensity of experience into public symbols. "Simply" is doing sly work here: it pretends the difference is small, but it underlines how hard it is to make words carry what life actually feels like.
The intent is partly democratizing, partly needling. It flatters the reader (you have an inner lyric life) while also challenging the cultural bureaucracy around art: credentials, gatekeepers, the idea that creativity needs official permission. In Fowles's world - steeped in postwar skepticism and the metafictional games of the 1960s and 70s - authorship is never just authorship. Its a performance of control. This line nudges against that control by suggesting that the raw material of poetry lives outside the page: in memory, desire, moral choice, even the stories people tell themselves to survive.
The subtext is that language is both medium and limitation. Poets are not the only ones living poetically; they are the ones willing (or cursed) to translate the private intensity of experience into public symbols. "Simply" is doing sly work here: it pretends the difference is small, but it underlines how hard it is to make words carry what life actually feels like.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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