"Youth condemns; maturity condones"
About this Quote
A four-word dagger, polished to a shine: "Youth condemns; maturity condones". Lowell builds the line like a courtroom drama in miniature, with the semicolon as the hinge where certainty swings into compromise. The aphorism works because it flatters neither side. Youth gets the moral high ground, but it’s also sketched as reflexive, quick to sentence before it understands the evidence. Maturity, meanwhile, isn’t redeemed as wisdom; it’s implicated in the soft corruption of experience, the way time teaches you not just complexity but also convenience.
Lowell was writing in a modernist moment when old certainties were cracking and new ones were being aggressively auditioned. As a poet moving through the early 20th century’s churn - suffrage battles, labor unrest, a world war, the rapid reordering of social life - she would have seen condemnation become a cultural sport: ideological purity as identity, judgment as performance. But she also watched institutions survive by absorbing critique, translating outrage into etiquette and policy tweaks. "Condones" is the key sting: it suggests not compassion but permission, the shrug that keeps systems intact.
The subtext is a warning about the life cycle of conviction. The young condemn to define themselves against the world; the mature condone because they’ve made arrangements with it. Lowell’s economy of language turns that trajectory into a challenge: if maturity means understanding, why does it so often look like excusing? And if youth’s severity is naive, why does it so often name what everyone else has decided to live with?
Lowell was writing in a modernist moment when old certainties were cracking and new ones were being aggressively auditioned. As a poet moving through the early 20th century’s churn - suffrage battles, labor unrest, a world war, the rapid reordering of social life - she would have seen condemnation become a cultural sport: ideological purity as identity, judgment as performance. But she also watched institutions survive by absorbing critique, translating outrage into etiquette and policy tweaks. "Condones" is the key sting: it suggests not compassion but permission, the shrug that keeps systems intact.
The subtext is a warning about the life cycle of conviction. The young condemn to define themselves against the world; the mature condone because they’ve made arrangements with it. Lowell’s economy of language turns that trajectory into a challenge: if maturity means understanding, why does it so often look like excusing? And if youth’s severity is naive, why does it so often name what everyone else has decided to live with?
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
|---|
More Quotes by Amy
Add to List
