Aging & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is doing something sly: he flatters “clever young poets” while quietly cutting them down to size. The line reads like a kindly memo from an elder, but its real target is the Romantic-era temptation to treat poetry as a fog machine - all atmosphere, no craft. By calling his definitions “homely,” Coleridge performs humility even as he lays down a standard sharp enough to embarrass anyone hiding behind vagueness. “Homely” also signals an English suspicion of overfinery: poetry should be made, not merely felt.

The distinction is tiny on paper and brutal in practice. Prose is “words in their best order” - already hard, already a discipline. Poetry, then, isn’t a different substance; it’s an intensification, a ruthless compression where the choice of each word carries extra voltage. “Best words” implies precision and surprise; “best order” implies inevitability, the sense that moving anything would break the spell. He’s arguing that poetry isn’t just elevated prose, and it’s not just musical language either; it’s language under maximum pressure, where meaning, sound, and rhythm lock together.

There’s subtext, too, about cultural authority. Coleridge is staking out the critic’s power to judge, not by personal taste but by arrangement and selection - criteria that can be argued over. In an age intoxicated by genius, he’s reminding writers that genius still has to edit.