Time & Perspective Quote by Christopher Fry

Poetry, for Fry, is a high-speed medium with a built-in speed trap. The line reads like a neat paradox, but it’s also a sly piece of audience management from a playwright who lived on the knife-edge between lyric speech and stage clarity. He’s praising compression - poetry’s ability to load meaning into image, rhythm, and omission - while warning that the same density punishes skim-reading. If you arrive half-present, you don’t just miss a detail; you miss the method.

The “virtue” and “drawback” aren’t moral judgments so much as a contract. Poetry asks for full attention because it communicates on multiple channels at once: literal sense, sound, pacing, and the charged silence between lines. Prose can afford to be generous and explanatory; it can carry you. Poetry expects you to meet it halfway, to supply inference, to hear the beat that signals what a sentence “means” emotionally even before it resolves grammatically. That’s why Fry frames the failure mode as time dilation: inattentive reading makes the poem feel longer and emptier, like watching a fast, intricate play through a foggy window.

Context matters: Fry’s work often fought the mid-century suspicion that poetic language was decorative, old-fashioned, or evasive. This quip doubles as a defense of poetic drama. He’s arguing that poetry isn’t less efficient than prose; it’s more efficient, but only for a reader (or theatergoer) willing to participate. The subtext is almost admonitory: if it feels like nothing’s happening, check your attention before you blame the art.