Life's Pleasures Quote by George Farquhar

“Poetry is a mere drug, Sir” lands like a sneer in a powdered wig: brisk, aristocratic, and designed to puncture the era’s more delicate pieties. Farquhar, a Restoration and early-18th-century dramatist, wrote for a stage that thrived on appetite - sex, status, money, and the performance of virtue. Calling poetry a “drug” doesn’t just insult verse; it reframes art as chemistry, something ingested to alter mood, dull pain, or manufacture feeling on demand.

The “mere” is the blade. It suggests poetry is not revelation or moral instruction but a consumable. That’s a sly inversion of the period’s respectable line that poetry refines the soul. Farquhar’s theater is full of characters who use language the way they use clothes: as camouflage and leverage. In that world, poetry becomes another social technology - a stimulant for flirtation, a sedative for conscience, a fashionable addiction for people who can afford to indulge.

“Sir” matters too. It’s not intimacy; it’s a challenge issued in polite form, the verbal equivalent of tapping someone’s chest with a cane. The speaker isn’t merely expressing taste; he’s asserting a worldview: that sentiment is suspect, that elevated language is often just a delivery system for self-deception. Yet the line also carries a wink of complicity. Drugs can be trivial and irresistible at once. Farquhar isn’t rejecting poetry so much as admitting what his audience already knows: art works because it messes with you, and pretending otherwise is the biggest fantasy on the bill.