Life & Wisdom Quote by John Masefield

Masefield sneaks a small provocation into what looks like a tidy compliment to poets. “Common sense” is the credential he insists on first: a refusal of the romantic myth that poetry is just pure feeling, mystical inspiration, or decorative language. He’s saying the poem has to be built on an adult grasp of how the world works - human motives, physical reality, consequence. That’s the floor, not the ceiling. And he twists the knife by adding “which not all have,” a sly reminder that plenty of educated people still manage to be fools.

Then comes the real gatekeeper: “an uncommon sense.” Not nonsense, not eccentricity for its own sake, but a rarer perceptual angle - the ability to see what’s hiding in plain sight and to make it legible. The phrase suggests a second set of instincts: metaphor, compression, rhythm, and the courage to make strange connections without losing the reader. Poetry, for Masefield, is not an escape from sense but a heightened version of it.

The structure does the work. “Mixture” implies craft, proportion, and restraint; the poet is a mixer, not a medium. The parallel clauses (“which not all have” / “which very few have”) quietly redraw the talent pyramid: basic sanity is already scarce, and the leap to genuine poetic perception is scarcer still.

Coming from a late-Victorian, early-20th-century English poet who lived through industrial modernity and war, the line reads as a defense of poetry’s seriousness. In an age that prized practicality, Masefield argues poetry is practical - just with better senses.