Art & Creativity Quote by James Schuyler

The line lands like a compliment delivered with a wince. Schuyler, a poet with exquisitely tuned nerves for language, stages a moment of baffled recognition: confronted with something being called "poetry", he reacts not with reverence but with refusal. The joke is that the refusal is itself a literary move. It’s a deadpan flourish that treats "poetry" less as a sacred category than as a social label people stick on work that may feel pretentious, fashionable, or simply alien.

Schuyler came up amid the New York School, where taste was a contact sport and the boundaries between high art, casual talk, and aesthetic posturing were constantly tested. Read in that milieu, the line is a small act of insurgency against credentialed seriousness. It also signals anxiety: the fear that the gate has shifted, that what counts as poetry now might require a pose Schuyler can’t or won’t adopt. The best New York School irony is never purely sneering; it’s protective. By saying he’ll never write "any myself", he’s dodging the pressure to imitate the prevailing style and keeping intact his own sense of what feels true on the page.

Subtextually, Schuyler is pointing at how artistic movements enforce their norms: if a definition becomes too elastic, it can start to feel like a private joke; if it becomes too narrow, it becomes a uniform. His line needles both possibilities, with the added sting that it arrives from someone inside the house. That’s why it works: it sounds like an offhand remark, but it’s really a compact manifesto about taste, belonging, and the right to opt out.