Life & Wisdom Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater’s line quietly demotes the grand myth of artistic novelty. The “subjects of poetry” are “few and recurrent” not because poets lack imagination, but because human life keeps circling the same fixed points: love, loss, power, time, death, faith, money, loneliness. What changes, and what makes art worth revisiting, is the weather system inside the person experiencing them. “The moods of man” are “infinitely various and unstable” - a claim that feels almost modernist in its psychology, even as it argues for tradition in subject matter.

The intent is both consoling and chastening. Consoling, because it tells artists they don’t have to invent new planets to matter; they have to render familiar terrain with emotional accuracy. Chastening, because it shifts the burden from clever premises to perception. If the topics repeat, the only honest measure of originality is whether a work catches a real, fleeting interior state rather than a prepackaged feeling.

The subtext pushes against a marketplace notion of innovation. Art doesn’t “progress” by acquiring new themes the way technology acquires features; it deepens by refining its access to consciousness, to subtle gradations of fear, tenderness, boredom, exaltation, resentment. By adding, “It is the same in all arts,” Drinkwater widens the claim into an aesthetic ethic: painters return to faces and light; composers to longing and tension; filmmakers to families and violence. The forms recur, the emotions mutate. That instability is not a problem to solve; it’s the engine that keeps the old subjects inexhaustible.