Faith & Spirit Quote by John Barton

The line lands like a shrug with a sharpened edge: a poet asked to define the “ideal reader” refuses the entire premise. “God only knows” is comic deflation, but it’s also a strategic abdication. In a culture that treats readership as a target demographic and the writer as a brand manager, Barton answers with the oldest possible authority and the vaguest possible data. It’s a joke about omniscience that doubles as a critique of literary gatekeeping.

The subtext is less mystical than it sounds. Barton isn’t claiming poetry is for no one; he’s pointing at the fantasy that art can be reverse-engineered for a single, correctly calibrated consumer. “Ideal reader” is the kind of phrase that sneaks institutional power into an aesthetic conversation: workshops, publishers, reviewers, even grant panels want to know who your work is “for,” because that makes it legible, fundable, and sortable. Barton’s retort exposes how often that question is really about permission.

The wording matters. “Who is” sets up a solvable riddle; “God only knows” flips it into epistemology. It implies the reader is not a fixed person but a moving encounter: someone you can’t fully imagine, arriving with their own history, hunger, and misreadings. In that sense, the line is an argument for poetry’s risk. The poem doesn’t succeed by pleasing an “ideal” audience; it succeeds by surviving contact with real ones.