Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Accuracy sounds like a modest virtue, almost clerical, until Sharon Olds puts it at the center of writing. Coming from a poet known for bodily candor and family-flayed intimacy, “being accurate” isn’t about fact-checking so much as refusing the comfort of vagueness. Olds has built a career on poems that expose the private material many writers sand down into tasteful metaphor: sex, illness, marriage, parenthood, cruelty. In that terrain, accuracy becomes an ethical posture. She’s not aiming for polite lyric “truthiness”; she’s insisting that the emotional record match the lived event, down to the discomforting detail.

The line also carries a quiet rebuke to how culture often expects women’s confession to be either therapeutic blur or sensational spectacle. Olds signals craft, not just disclosure. Accurate means she’s listening to the sentence the way a witness listens in court: what exactly happened, what exactly was said, what exactly did it feel like in the body at that moment. That precision is how she avoids melodrama. It’s also how she earns her shocks; the power comes less from taboo content than from the steadiness with which it’s rendered.

Contextually, Olds emerges from late-20th-century American poetry where “confessional” could be a compliment or a dismissal. Her phrasing sidesteps the genre label and reclaims the labor: the poet as observer, editor, and moral accountant. Accuracy, here, is the hinge between raw experience and art that can’t be argued away.