Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Romantic poet defining poetry like a ruthless copy editor is the first, quiet joke here. Coleridge - apostle of the sublime, the druggy dream-logic of "Kubla Khan", the haunted moral weather of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" - boils the whole enterprise down to arrangement. Not inspiration. Not confession. Order. The line flatters craft over aura, and it lands because it feels almost suspiciously modest for someone who spent his life defending imagination as a world-making force.

"Best words" signals a faith in precision: diction as ethics. In Coleridge's moment, poetry was fighting on two fronts. On one side, neoclassical taste prized polish and rules; on the other, the new Romantic pitch insisted on feeling, spontaneity, the common language of "real men". Coleridge threads the needle. He doesn't deny emotion; he implies that emotion becomes legible only when language is tuned. The poem isn't the feeling - it's the machine that makes feeling transferable.

"Best order" is the subtextual flex. Order means music (meter, cadence), argument (how ideas are staged), and revelation (when an image arrives). It's also an implicit hierarchy: not all language is equal, and not all "self-expression" deserves the name poetry. Coleridge is drawing a boundary around art in an age of expanding readership, cheap print, and political upheaval. The definition is compact enough to sound democratic, but its real purpose is selective: poetry is what survives the ruthless test of arrangement.