Leadership Quote by John Denham

Denham’s line is a politician’s warning dressed up as literary lament: power leaks when you try to move it across borders. By calling poetry a “subtle spirit,” he frames verse as something quasi-physical but ungraspable, like scent or alcohol fumes. Translation becomes not a heroic act of bridge-building but an act of exposure, where the very qualities that make a poem potent - sound, rhythm, cultural shorthand, double meanings - volatilize the moment you “pour” them into a new vessel.

The metaphor is doing quiet political work. A 17th-century English statesman is steeped in the era’s anxieties about authority, nation, and the stability of words themselves. If laws and proclamations depend on precision, then poetry is the opposite: its force comes from ambiguity and texture. Denham implies that those textures are not incidental decorations; they are the engine. Render them into another language and you can keep the plot, the argument, the “sense,” but you lose the charge.

There’s also a hint of gatekeeping that feels unmistakably official: if poetry “evaporates” in translation, then the highest cultural goods remain local, owned by the language that produced them. Yet the line’s enduring sting is that it’s not merely conservative. It recognizes a hard truth about art: meaning isn’t just what is said, but how it lands in the mouth, in the ear, in the shared memory of a community. Translation can be brilliant, Denham suggests, but it can’t be innocent. It always changes the state of the thing.