Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Fitzgerald

“Taste is the feminine of genius” lands like a compliment with a trapdoor. Fitzgerald isn’t just elevating taste; he’s quarantining it. In a single sentence he draws a neat Victorian border: genius is the masculine force that originates, conquers, invents; taste is the feminine faculty that refines, selects, beautifies. The line flatters the “feminine” by making it indispensable to greatness, then quietly demotes it by casting it as derivative. Genius gets to be primary creation. Taste gets to be curation.

That’s why the aphorism works: it’s a compact social theory disguised as aesthetic wisdom. Fitzgerald, a poet and translator best known for his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lived inside a literary culture obsessed with distinction-making - who has originality, who merely has sensibility. “Taste” in the 19th century wasn’t a throwaway preference; it was a class-coded instrument, a way to signal that you belong among the people who know. Feminizing it lets the culture praise discernment while keeping authority in male hands, the same way women were often allowed to arbitrate manners and ornament while being denied authorship and public power.

The subtext is also anxious: genius without taste is vulgar, chaotic, embarrassing. By assigning taste a gender, Fitzgerald personifies an internal editor - necessary, even intimate, but positioned as helpmate rather than sovereign. The line is elegant because it compresses an entire hierarchy into a proverb. It’s also revealing because it shows how aesthetics became a polite language for policing gender, class, and who gets to be called original.