"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince"
About this Quote
Mencken draws a knife-edge distinction that doubles as a manifesto: charm is poetry's victory lap, but prose has to win the argument. Coming from America’s premier curmudgeon-a critic who treated public pieties like piñatas-the line is less a neutral taxonomy than a provocation aimed at genteel letters and sentimental thinking. He’s warning that beautiful language can’t be a hall pass. If your sentences only sing, you’ve given the reader a mood, not a reason.
The wit is in the implied hierarchy. Poetry gets to stop at enchantment because its job is to intensify experience, not prosecute a case. Prose, in Mencken’s hands, is an instrument of pressure: it must submit itself to evidence, logic, and the hard friction of clarity. The word "also" matters. Mencken isn’t banning style; he’s insisting that style be yoked to an outcome. Charm is permitted, even desirable, but it’s insufficient.
The subtext is a jab at rhetoric that substitutes for thought-particularly the kind Mencken saw in politics, sermons, and boosterish journalism of the early 20th century. He lived through a period when mass media learned how to sell feelings at scale; persuasion became performance. Mencken refuses that bargain. Prose, he implies, has civic responsibilities. It enters the public arena, where ideas have consequences, and where a pretty phrase that doesn’t convince is not just artless-it’s evasive.
It’s a craftsman’s standard disguised as a quip: earn your elegance. Then prove your point.
The wit is in the implied hierarchy. Poetry gets to stop at enchantment because its job is to intensify experience, not prosecute a case. Prose, in Mencken’s hands, is an instrument of pressure: it must submit itself to evidence, logic, and the hard friction of clarity. The word "also" matters. Mencken isn’t banning style; he’s insisting that style be yoked to an outcome. Charm is permitted, even desirable, but it’s insufficient.
The subtext is a jab at rhetoric that substitutes for thought-particularly the kind Mencken saw in politics, sermons, and boosterish journalism of the early 20th century. He lived through a period when mass media learned how to sell feelings at scale; persuasion became performance. Mencken refuses that bargain. Prose, he implies, has civic responsibilities. It enters the public arena, where ideas have consequences, and where a pretty phrase that doesn’t convince is not just artless-it’s evasive.
It’s a craftsman’s standard disguised as a quip: earn your elegance. Then prove your point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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