Art & Creativity Quote by Edmund C. Stedman

Stedman’s line carries the polite bite of an insider defending the gates while pretending they don’t exist. Calling poetry “chief of the fine art” isn’t just boosterism; it’s a ranking move in a late-19th-century culture still sorting high art from mass print. Poetry, for Stedman, sits at the top because it compresses meaning into the smallest space: fewer materials, higher stakes. One weak adjective and the whole structure wobbles.

The shrewdness is in the double claim: poetry is “the easiest to dabble in” and “the hardest” to master. He’s naming a permanent vulnerability of the medium: everyone has access to the basic tools (a pen, a rhyme, an emotional experience) and that accessibility invites amateurs, sentiment merchants, and fashionable versifiers. In an era of booming magazines and public recitation, “dabbling” wasn’t a hypothetical; it was the marketplace. Poetry was everywhere, which made excellence harder to recognize and easier to counterfeit.

Subtextually, Stedman is also protecting labor. The romantic myth says poems arrive like weather. He counters with craft, discipline, and the humiliating reality that most attempts fail. The phrase “true excellence” is doing heavy work: not popularity, not moral uplift, not cleverness, but a rarer standard that survives time and rereading. He’s arguing that poetry’s openness is exactly why it demands severity from both writer and reader.