Art & Creativity Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis lands the joke with a single image: the most delicate thing you can imagine meeting the most indifferent landscape in America. A rose petal doesn’t even make a sound; the Grand Canyon is famous for throwing sound back at you. So the simile turns poetry into a kind of performed futility, a wager on responsiveness from a world built to ignore you.

The line works because it’s not just self-deprecation, it’s a diagnosis of audience and scale. Poetry, in Marquis’s framing, is a micro-gesture aimed at a macro-culture. The poet releases something intimate, fragrant, easily crushed, then waits for proof it mattered. The “echo” is recognition: reviews, sales, someone quoting you back, the comforting illusion that language returns to its source unchanged. But in a canyon, what comes back is distorted, delayed, and shaped by the rock. That’s the subtext: reception is never pure, and the public answers on its own terms.

As a journalist in early 20th-century America, Marquis lived in the machinery of mass attention: deadlines, circulation numbers, the quick hit of daily readership. Poetry, by contrast, asks for patience and offers no guarantee of uptake. His metaphor quietly stages that tension between the disposable roar of newsprint and the fragile ambition of lyric permanence. Cynical, yes, but also tender: he’s admitting that poets keep dropping petals anyway, addicted to the possibility that silence might someday sound like reply.