Success Quote by F. L. Lucas

Lucas is policing poetry’s tone with the authority of a critic who has seen art conscripted into sermons. His line flatters poetry by treating it as a creature with its own habitat: it thrives in suggestion, in the charged half-light where meaning is felt before it’s articulated. The moment it’s marched into “the open pulpit,” it becomes propaganda, or at least instruction, and the very instrument that makes it poetry - cadence, ambiguity, pressure between words - “grows hoarse.” That hoarseness is the tell. Preaching isn’t merely a different message; it’s a different vocal technique, one that exhausts the subtle musculature of lyric.

The intent is less anti-morality than anti-bad art. Lucas isn’t arguing that poems shouldn’t care about ethics or politics; he’s warning that directness can be a lazy substitute for craft. “Imply” names an aesthetic of trust: the poet trusts the reader to meet the work halfway, to complete the circuit. “Preach” assumes the opposite - a crowd to be managed, not a mind to be engaged. The subtext is a defense of complexity against the didactic temper that rises in periods of social heat.

Context matters: Lucas wrote in a century when literature was repeatedly asked to justify itself - by wars, by ideology, by mass politics, by the public hunger for clarity and uplift. His metaphor answers that demand with a cold, practical point: art can carry conviction, but it persuades best when it doesn’t sound like persuasion. The pulpit is where language goes to win; poetry, Lucas insists, works by making us listen.