"We are suffering from too much sarcasm"
About this Quote
The complaint is not about humorlessness but about a culture that confuses wit with scorn. Sarcasm, from the Greek for tearing flesh, names a habit of speech that wounds while pretending to be clever. To say we are suffering from it is to diagnose a communal ailment: a public discourse so saturated with the reflexive sneer that sincerity feels naive and careful thought seems uncool. It is easier to look smart by cutting down than by building up.
Marianne Moore’s poetics offer an antidote. She prized precision, humility, and gusto, qualities that require patience with facts and a willingness to be moved. In her much-quoted poem Poetry, she rejects showy artifice in favor of imaginary gardens with real toads in them, a call for authenticity that pushes against the hollow stance sarcasm encourages. Genuine perception asks for attention and risk; sarcasm dodges both through superiority.
As an editor and critic during high-modernist ferment, Moore saw how a fashionable tone can govern taste. Sarcasm spreads quickly because it promises social belonging through shared contempt. But it narrows the imagination. It reduces satire, which tries to reform, to mere derision that tries to injure. It turns criticism into performance and conversation into a competition for the sharpest put-down. The result is a thinning of the moral and sensory life on which art and community depend.
Moore’s own wit was exacting but never cruel. Her poems assemble facts, quotations, and creatures with meticulous care, modeling a kind of attention that honors the world rather than scoring points off it. The stance she commends is not earnestness without laughter; it is seriousness without meanness, play without contempt.
To hear her warning today is to recognize how snark erodes trust and curiosity. If we are suffering from too much sarcasm, the cure is not solemnity but a renewed appetite for accuracy, courtesy, and wonder: criticism that clarifies rather than humiliates, and language that tells the truth without tearing the skin.
Marianne Moore’s poetics offer an antidote. She prized precision, humility, and gusto, qualities that require patience with facts and a willingness to be moved. In her much-quoted poem Poetry, she rejects showy artifice in favor of imaginary gardens with real toads in them, a call for authenticity that pushes against the hollow stance sarcasm encourages. Genuine perception asks for attention and risk; sarcasm dodges both through superiority.
As an editor and critic during high-modernist ferment, Moore saw how a fashionable tone can govern taste. Sarcasm spreads quickly because it promises social belonging through shared contempt. But it narrows the imagination. It reduces satire, which tries to reform, to mere derision that tries to injure. It turns criticism into performance and conversation into a competition for the sharpest put-down. The result is a thinning of the moral and sensory life on which art and community depend.
Moore’s own wit was exacting but never cruel. Her poems assemble facts, quotations, and creatures with meticulous care, modeling a kind of attention that honors the world rather than scoring points off it. The stance she commends is not earnestness without laughter; it is seriousness without meanness, play without contempt.
To hear her warning today is to recognize how snark erodes trust and curiosity. If we are suffering from too much sarcasm, the cure is not solemnity but a renewed appetite for accuracy, courtesy, and wonder: criticism that clarifies rather than humiliates, and language that tells the truth without tearing the skin.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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