Life & Wisdom Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater dresses a bold claim in almost shy, Edwardian syntax: poetry wins because it’s the “sign” of what people want without admitting they want it. The key move is that he doesn’t treat poems as ornamental language but as evidence. Poetry points to a hunger that predates taste, education, or even self-knowledge: “intensity of life or completeness of experience.” He’s arguing that poems aren’t for the already enlightened; they’re for anyone who’s ever felt their lived reality arrive in fragments and wanted it to cohere.

The subtext is defensive in the way early 20th-century literary talk often is. Drinkwater is writing from a moment when mass entertainment, industrial routine, and the shocks of modernity are remaking attention itself. His assertion that poetry’s appeal is “a matter of course” reads like a preemptive rebuttal to the emerging suspicion that poetry is a niche art for a cultivated few. He flips the anxiety: if poetry sometimes feels elitist, that’s not because the desire is rare; it’s because the desire is unconscious, easily displaced into work, spectacle, or sentiment.

“Intensity” and “completeness” are tellingly paired. Intensity is the spike: the heightened instant, the rush, the revelation. Completeness is the long game: shaping experience into a whole. Drinkwater’s intent is to claim both for poetry, positioning it as a technology of feeling and meaning-making. The universality he predicts isn’t about everyone reading sonnets; it’s about everyone needing some form of language that makes life feel fully lived.