Art & Creativity Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater’s line is a poet’s heresy aimed at rescuing song from poetry’s shadow. Coming from a writer whose day job was language on the page, it reads less like dismissal than boundary-drawing: once words enter music, they stop behaving like “poetry” in the strict literary sense. Meter, metaphor, and syntactic elegance get demoted. Timing, vowel color, breath, and the way a phrase lands on a chord start calling the shots.

The intent is corrective. Early 20th-century Britain still carried the Victorian reflex to treat song lyrics as poems that happened to be sung, a habit reinforced by art song and parlor ballads. Drinkwater pushes back against that genteel hierarchy. “Finished art” is doing a lot of work here: he’s not talking about raw ditties, but mature songwriting where meaning is co-authored by melody, harmony, and performance. In that ecosystem, a banal line can become devastating if it arrives after a suspension resolves; a brilliant line can collapse if it fights the melodic contour. The subtext is almost technical: in song, words are instruments. Their value is not just semantic but sonic.

There’s also a quiet warning to poets dabbling in lyrics: don’t bring page-based standards to a form that measures success by different physics. Songwriting isn’t lesser poetry; it’s a different contract with the listener, one where comprehension can be partial, repetition can be a virtue, and a single syllable can carry the emotional weight that poetry would need a stanza to earn.