Life & Wisdom Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater builds a little hierarchy of scarcity, and it lands like a compliment with teeth. “Great men” are already “rare” (a nod to the old Carlylean idea that history hinges on heroic individuals), but “poets are rarer” implies that the imagination and moral sensitivity needed to make art are even less common than command, charisma, or public achievement. Then comes the real twist: the “great man who is a poet” isn’t just a double rarity, he’s an alchemical event, someone whose power is “transfigured” by language.

That verb matters. Drinkwater isn’t praising greatness that happens to write verse; he’s arguing that poetry changes the kind of authority greatness becomes. The subtext is a critique of raw, unexamined power. In the early 20th century - with mass politics hardening, war looming, and celebrity beginning to professionalize “greatness” - the dream of a leader tempered by lyric intelligence reads like a corrective. Poetry here stands in for conscience, interiority, and the ability to see the human cost behind slogans.

There’s also a defensive pride in the poet’s posture. Drinkwater, a poet watching public life reward administrators and soldiers, quietly insists that art is not decoration but a higher instrument of perception. The “rarest of all events” is a world where influence and imagination fuse: where someone can move crowds and still be moved by truth, nuance, and music. It’s aspirational, and faintly cynical, because he’s betting you can count such people on one hand.