Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line is a sly rebuke to the modern itch to treat art like a newspaper article with prettier line breaks. “True” here isn’t correspondence to external facts; it’s an internal verdict. A poem earns its truth the way a good novel does: by coherence of voice, image, rhythm, and emotional logic. If it “hangs together,” it creates a world you can inhabit without constantly checking it against the one outside.

The barb lands in the contrast with “information,” which “points to something else.” Facts are instrumental; they’re valuable because they deliver you elsewhere: a conclusion, a decision, a proof, a fix. Forster is circling what gets lost when we demand that art justify itself in the same way - as message, moral, or data. The subtext is anti-utilitarian, almost anti-extractive: stop asking the poem to be useful. Stop interrogating it for a takeaway. Let it be an experience with its own integrity.

Context matters. Forster, a novelist famous for “Only connect,” is often read as a humanist bridging inner life and social world. That makes this insistence on self-containedness more pointed, not less. He’s not denying reality; he’s defending a different kind of meaning-making, one that isn’t reducible to reportage. Coming from a writer shaped by early 20th-century upheavals - when ideology and “information” increasingly organized public life - the statement doubles as a warning: when everything must point outward, art becomes propaganda or decoration. A poem that points only to itself is not escapist; it’s sovereign.