Life & Wisdom Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater is pushing back against the tidy little filing cabinet of genre, the habit of treating “lyric” as if it were a separate species rather than a particular pose a poem can strike. The sly move is in his opening concession: “A lyric, it is true...” He grants the textbook definition, then calmly detonates it. If lyric equals personal emotion, and all poetry is in some sense personal emotion, then the category collapses under its own certainty.

The intent is partly aesthetic and partly political (in the literary sense): Drinkwater is defending the continuity of poetic experience against critics, anthologists, and classrooms that carve literature into “kinds” as though they were natural facts. His phrase “wholly artificial divisions” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests that these boundaries aren’t discovered in poems; they’re imposed on them, often for convenience, prestige, or gatekeeping. “Have no real being” is almost metaphysical, a blunt reminder that labels can start to feel more real than the art they supposedly describe.

Context matters: Drinkwater writes in an early 20th-century Britain where poetry is renegotiating its public role amid modernism, war, and shifting tastes. Taxonomies multiply as authority shifts from shared tradition to criticism-as-institution. His subtext is a warning: when we treat genre as essence, we end up reading for compliance instead of force. The quote works because it doesn’t romanticize feeling; it exposes classification as a kind of optical illusion, a critical habit that can make living poems look like pinned specimens.