Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger McGough

McGough lets the romance of the solitary poet run for about one sentence before puncturing it with something sturdier: the scene. He acknowledges the private dread built into making art that doesn’t come with quarterly reviews or obvious utility. “Is it worth it?” isn’t rhetorical bravado; it’s the recurring audit artists perform when the rewards are intermittent and the silence is loud. The line works because it’s candid without self-pity, a working poet admitting that vocation can feel like a long, unpaid argument with yourself.

Then comes the pivot: not inspiration, not genius, but proximity. The subtext is almost political. Creativity, he suggests, isn’t just an interior flame; it’s a social infrastructure. “Other poets” function like proof of life: evidence that the strange compulsion to shape language isn’t a personal malfunction. That’s why “part of a scene” matters. A scene supplies audience, rivalry, gossip, affirmation, the ordinary human frictions that keep a practice from drifting into abstraction.

McGough’s context sharpens this. As a leading figure of the Liverpool Poets, he emerged in a Britain where poetry was being yanked off the pedestal and dropped into clubs, readings, broadcasts - treated less like scripture and more like public speech. His insistence that the writers were “very different” is the quiet rebuke to clique mentality: community doesn’t require sameness. It requires witness. Togetherness doesn’t erase loneliness, but it makes perseverance feel less like delusion and more like participation in a living culture.