Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Adamson

The comedy here is the smallness of the voice against the bigness of the dream. Adamson stages the entire romance of the writerly life in one plainspoken sentence - poetry, books, a living - then punctures it with that double hedge: "I guess... I guess". It reads like someone replaying an old vow and hearing, with adult ears, how wildly unrealistic it sounded. The repetition is doing the work of self-cross-examination; it is modesty as a form of critique.

Calling it "a pretty ambitious plan" is almost aggressively understated, a wry admission that the market has never promised poets rent money, much less stability. The subtext is less "I failed" than "the world was never built to reward this". It hints at an era when the professional pathways for a thinker-poet were narrow: you either attached yourself to institutions, patrons, or took on respectable labor and wrote around it. The line remembers a time when "publishing books" was not the same as having an audience, and "making a living" was the most utopian clause of all.

As a philosopher, Adamson is also sneaking in a theory of aspiration: we construct life-plans that feel coherent in the imagination, then time exposes the hidden premise - that society will value what we value. The wit isn’t showy; it’s the dry, slightly bruised humor of someone who’s learned how many dreams depend on economic miracles.