Success Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater draws a hard border around what counts as poetry, and it has less to do with rhyme than with strain. He isn’t chasing prettiness; he’s demanding evidence that a mind has been pushed to its limit by feeling and vision. The mood, he argues, must register as something that “exhausts the imaginative capacity” - an experience so pressurized that ordinary phrasing can’t hold it without leaking. That’s the tell. Real poetry doesn’t merely report an emotion; it shows the cost of having had it.

The subtext is almost puritanical: poetry is earned. If the writer hasn’t reached that point of imaginative overdraw, the work will betray itself in one of two ways. It will slip into prose - competent, descriptive, explainable, but fundamentally untransformed. Or it will congeal into “insignificant verse,” the kind of metered language that wears poetic costume while saying nothing urgent. Drinkwater’s insult is surgical: versifying is not the same thing as making a poem.

Context matters here. Writing in the early 20th century, with modernism challenging Victorian polish and Georgian lyricism (Drinkwater’s own milieu) trying to defend its seriousness, he’s offering a quality test that sidesteps fashion. Not “is it experimental?” or “is it traditional?” but: does it feel inevitable, as if anything less than poetry would be inadequate? That’s his bar - and it’s deliberately unforgiving.