Success Quote by Edmund Waller

Waller’s couplet is a sly defense of craft disguised as a complaint about credit. The line turns on a deliciously intimate idea: the public only ever applauds the finished poem, never the invisible labor of restraint. If readers could see what the poet “discreetly blot[s]” - the abandoned metaphors, the overreaching conceits, the easy rhymes that felt clever at 2 a.m. - they’d praise the poet more, not less. Revision isn’t merely cleanup; it’s a form of judgment, and Waller frames that judgment as the true mark of skill.

The verb choice matters. “Discreetly” suggests tact and self-command, not just correction. In a 17th-century literary culture that prized polish, balance, and social poise, discretion was an aesthetic and a survival strategy. Waller wrote through civil war, regime change, and the Restoration; knowing what to keep, what to soften, what to leave unsaid wasn’t only poetic technique. It was political intelligence. The couplet quietly aligns the poet’s editorial instinct with a courtier’s instinct: don’t show the seams, don’t reveal the missteps, don’t advertise the messy process.

There’s also a small jab at audiences. Praise is presented as shallowly outcome-driven, blind to the discipline that prevents embarrassment. Waller implies that what separates a poet from a versifier is not the ability to produce lines, but the willingness to destroy them. The poem’s best feature, in other words, is the poet’s capacity for refusal.