Poetry Quote by William Temple

Temple’s line is a neat little provocation: greatness in poetry isn’t just talent, it’s a kind of monomania. The phrasing “applied himself much” carries a faintly moral, even Protestant weight, as if attention were a finite resource you’re obligated to steward. Spread it across “anything else” and you dilute the very intensity that poetry demands.

The subtext is less about poets being impractical and more about the economics of focus. “Great” here doesn’t mean competent or admired; it means canonical, world-bending. Temple implies that level of art is built on an almost unreasonable concentration, a life organized around language the way an athlete’s life is organized around training. There’s a sly backhand in it too: if you’re balancing poetry with a career, a family, politics, ambition, you may be writing, but you’re not burning hot enough to rewrite the rules.

Contextually, the sentiment fits a long Western tradition that treats poetry as vocation rather than hobby, with a whiff of aristocratic suspicion toward “busy” people. The line also pre-emptively defends poets against charges of uselessness: if poets seem ill-suited to ordinary productivity, Temple suggests it’s because they’ve made a trade the rest of us secretly benefit from. The catch is what gets left out: plenty of major poets held jobs, fought wars, ran households, lived messy, overcommitted lives. Temple isn’t reporting a fact so much as selling an ideal - the myth of total devotion, which flatters poetry by making it jealous and expensive.