Life & Wisdom Quote by John Drinkwater

A poet pointing out that poetry usually comes in verse sounds like a throwaway footnote, which is exactly why it’s sly. Drinkwater’s line has the dry patience of someone watching readers and critics tie themselves in knots over definitions. The phrasing matters: “It should here be added” mimics scholarly housekeeping, while “habitually” does the real work, slipping between prescription and observation. He isn’t thundering that poetry must be verse; he’s conceding that, in practice, it tends to show up that way. The sentence performs moderation while quietly defending a boundary.

The context is early 20th-century literary churn, when modernism is pressuring every inherited form. Free verse is no longer a novelty; “poetry” is starting to be claimed by manifestos, prose experiments, and critical theories that want to sever the art from its traditional scaffolding. Drinkwater, a Georgian poet associated with more accessible lyricism, answers that pressure with a restrained reminder: you can argue all you like about what poetry is, but the cultural organism has habits, and form is one of them.

The subtext is anxiety about legitimacy. If poetry can be anything, then nothing has to earn the name. By insisting on “habit,” Drinkwater grounds poetry in a social pattern rather than a metaphysical essence: verse is not a law, but it is a norm, and norms have power. The line’s careful blandness becomes its critique of overheated avant-garde rhetoric, a small sentence trying to keep the category from dissolving.