"A moment's thinking is an hour in words"
About this Quote
Hood’s line is a tiny time-bomb aimed at the tyranny of explanation. “A moment’s thinking” suggests the kind of inward flash poets and ordinary people alike recognize: the instant when meaning arrives whole, before it’s chopped into sentences. Then he turns the screw. “An hour in words” isn’t praise for careful articulation; it’s a complaint about how language stretches, dilutes, and delays what the mind can grasp in a blink.
The wit is in the arithmetic. He converts thought into words the way factories convert raw material into product: slowly, noisily, with waste. It’s also a sideways jab at public discourse, even in Hood’s 19th-century Britain, where speeches, sermons, and Victorian propriety demanded endless verbal polish. Hood worked in an era that fetishized eloquence, yet he’s pointing out its costs: the more we translate insight into acceptable phrasing, the more we risk losing the original clarity.
Subtextually, the quote defends the private life of the mind. It implies that the truest understanding often precedes language, and that words are not neutral carriers but compromises shaped by audience, status, and the limits of syntax. There’s a poet’s humility here too: if a “moment” of thinking becomes an “hour” of words, poetry isn’t effortless inspiration; it’s labor, revision, and the long, imperfect chase after a fleeting internal certainty. Hood makes that struggle sound almost comic, which is his sly way of making it bearable.
The wit is in the arithmetic. He converts thought into words the way factories convert raw material into product: slowly, noisily, with waste. It’s also a sideways jab at public discourse, even in Hood’s 19th-century Britain, where speeches, sermons, and Victorian propriety demanded endless verbal polish. Hood worked in an era that fetishized eloquence, yet he’s pointing out its costs: the more we translate insight into acceptable phrasing, the more we risk losing the original clarity.
Subtextually, the quote defends the private life of the mind. It implies that the truest understanding often precedes language, and that words are not neutral carriers but compromises shaped by audience, status, and the limits of syntax. There’s a poet’s humility here too: if a “moment” of thinking becomes an “hour” of words, poetry isn’t effortless inspiration; it’s labor, revision, and the long, imperfect chase after a fleeting internal certainty. Hood makes that struggle sound almost comic, which is his sly way of making it bearable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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