Life & Wisdom Quote by Ian Hamilton Finlay

Finlay’s “Well, probably” is doing quiet damage control: a conversational shrug that masks a hard aesthetic break. He isn’t just bored with a scene; he’s policing a boundary. Concrete poetry, in the postwar boom of manifestos and little magazines, promised a clean escape from confessional gush: language as object, words arranged like architecture. Finlay helped make that promise real, which is why his irritation lands as more than taste. It’s a craftsman watching a tool get turned into a gimmick.

“There was a lot of bad concrete poetry” isn’t snobbery so much as a diagnosis of a movement’s success. Once a form becomes legible, it becomes reproducible, and reproducibility invites the lazy copy: typographic tricks, winking layouts, the poem as poster. Finlay’s complaint implies a moral economy of attention. Concrete poetry should compress meaning into form; it shouldn’t outsource meaning to the novelty of form.

The sharper barb is the second clause: concrete poetry “was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.” That “completely” is the tell. He’s insisting that concrete poetry remains, at bottom, poetry: the word still bears semantic pressure even when it’s spatially arranged. Visual poetry, in his view, risks letting the visual swallow the verbal, sliding into art-object territory where reading becomes optional.

Context matters: Finlay’s own practice often lives at the seam of text and object (later, the garden inscriptions and sculptural epigrams). The subtext is strategic: he’s clearing space for his next move while refusing to be filed under a trend he considers diluted and misnamed.