Life & Wisdom Quote by Bliss Carman

“I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts” lands like a provocation, but Carman isn’t auditioning for the role of anti-reality crank. He’s pushing back against a narrower target: the smug authority we give to “facts” once they’ve been stamped as settled. Calling facts “compromises” reframes them as social artifacts, not pure discoveries. The subtext is that consensus, not truth, often ends debates; “investigation cease[s]” not because reality has been exhausted, but because institutions, habits, and fatigue decide we’re done.

As a poet writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, Carman is channeling a modern anxiety about measurement and classification swallowing experience. The era’s faith in positivism, bureaucratic expertise, and industrial rationality made “facts” feel like tools of control: neat labels that flatten ambiguity, inner life, and the messy parts of being human. His choice of “tyranny” is strategic overkill. It dramatizes how facts can become moral cudgels, shutting down imagination and moral inquiry with a procedural “case closed.”

The line also exposes a paradox: facts are necessary, but their finality is suspicious. Carman is defending the unfinished, the speculative, the aesthetic - domains where meaning matters as much as verification. He’s not arguing for ignorance; he’s arguing for keeping the mind’s pressure on the world, refusing the comfort of premature certainty.