Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick William Robertson

Robertson is drawing a bright line between poetry as a truth-telling art and poetry as a truth-producing instrument. Coming from a Victorian clergyman, that distinction matters: he is not dismissing accuracy so much as refusing to let “accuracy” claim sole custody of truth. In an era hungry for systems - moral, scientific, theological - he argues for a different faculty of knowing, one that doesn’t arrive by proof but by recognition.

The phrasing is a quiet piece of rhetorical judo. “Think accurately” sounds virtuous, disciplined, almost clinical; it belongs to the ledger, the catechism, the laboratory. “Feel truly” is stranger, more demanding. It implies that feelings can be counterfeit, performative, socially inherited. Poetry’s job, for Robertson, is not to decorate emotion but to purify it: to strip sentimentality, self-deception, and easy pieties until what remains is honest. That’s a high bar, and it’s why the line lands with ethical weight rather than artsy permissiveness.

The subtext is also a warning to his own tribe. Religious language can become mechanically “accurate” while spiritually dead - doctrinally correct, emotionally hollow. Poetry, in this view, is a corrective to hardened certainty, a way to reawaken conscience and compassion when argument fails. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-reductionist. Robertson is defending the idea that some realities - grief, awe, moral dread, grace - are known most reliably when we stop treating the heart like an unreliable witness and start treating it like an organ of perception.