Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Eberhart

“Style is the perfection of a point of view” cuts against the lazy idea that style is just decoration. In Eberhart’s framing, style isn’t the frosting; it’s the finished edge of perception itself. A “point of view” is raw vision: what you notice, what you refuse to ignore, where your sympathy and suspicion land. Style is what happens when that vision gets disciplined into a repeatable music - line breaks, diction, cadence, image choice - until the reader can’t separate the world being described from the mind describing it.

The word “perfection” is doing quiet work. It doesn’t mean flawlessness so much as completion: a viewpoint refined until it achieves its fullest expressive form. That’s a poet’s value system. Poetry isn’t primarily about supplying information; it’s about rendering consciousness in a way that feels inevitable. When style is right, it becomes an ethical posture: precision as responsibility. Sloppy language signals sloppy seeing.

Context matters here. Eberhart comes out of a 20th-century American poetry landscape that watched modernism explode inherited forms, then asked what authenticity looks like after that rupture. His line argues that authenticity isn’t the absence of craft; it’s craft aligned with perception. The subtext is a rebuke to both camps: to the purist who fetishizes technique without vision, and to the confessional romantic who mistakes intensity for art. Your style is your worldview made audible. If it’s perfected, it’s because you’ve truly decided where you stand.