"Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response"
About this Quote
Mary Oliver is warning about a particular kind of selling out that doesn’t look like selling out at all: the slow, almost polite surrender of a writer’s oddness. Her phrasing makes the loss feel tactile. “Most strange and wonderful” is the marrow of an artistic voice - the part that can’t be workshoped into existence. Then she pairs it with “soften their roughest edges,” a domestic verb that implies self-editing as self-domestication, turning a living thing into something safe to handle.
The bite is in “accommodate” and “group response.” Oliver isn’t railing against readers; she’s naming the social physics that shape art. A “group response” suggests applause cues, market expectations, workshop consensus, the invisible committee that hovers over the page. It’s not censorship by force but by anticipation: the writer trims the lines that might confuse, alienate, or provoke because they can already hear the room. The subtext is that community can be a sedative. Belonging has a cost.
Context matters: Oliver built a career on clarity without capitulation, writing poems that are accessible yet never obedient. Coming out of late-20th-century literary culture - MFA workshops, prize circuits, taste-making institutions - she’s diagnosing how quickly “voice” gets standardized into “craft.” Her intent is protective, almost parental: keep the unruly parts. They’re not defects. They’re the evidence that the work is actually yours.
The bite is in “accommodate” and “group response.” Oliver isn’t railing against readers; she’s naming the social physics that shape art. A “group response” suggests applause cues, market expectations, workshop consensus, the invisible committee that hovers over the page. It’s not censorship by force but by anticipation: the writer trims the lines that might confuse, alienate, or provoke because they can already hear the room. The subtext is that community can be a sedative. Belonging has a cost.
Context matters: Oliver built a career on clarity without capitulation, writing poems that are accessible yet never obedient. Coming out of late-20th-century literary culture - MFA workshops, prize circuits, taste-making institutions - she’s diagnosing how quickly “voice” gets standardized into “craft.” Her intent is protective, almost parental: keep the unruly parts. They’re not defects. They’re the evidence that the work is actually yours.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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