Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Smith

Smith’s line is a rebuke to the fetish for novelty: the problem isn’t that we lack ideas, it’s that our best ones get handled to death. He frames thought as currency, a metaphor that quietly smuggles in a Victorian anxiety about mass circulation. In an age of booming print culture, slogans, morals, and political “principles” could travel faster than reflection. They gained reach while losing edge, like coins rubbed smooth by too many transactions. Smith isn’t complaining about repetition so much as the deadening effect of habitual language.

The real bite is in “called in.” That’s an economic term, not a poetic one. It implies a kind of intellectual central banking: society has a responsibility to withdraw debased ideas from circulation. There’s also a subtle warning about inflation. When everyone spends the same phrases - progress, duty, virtue, freedom - they stop buying anything. Words become units of exchange without purchasing power.

Then comes the romantic corrective: “the mint of genius.” Smith’s faith is not in committees, institutions, or incremental revision, but in the rare capacity of an artist-mind to remaster what’s already there. “Reissued fresh and new” doesn’t mean inventing from scratch; it means restoring the stamp, the relief, the legibility. That’s a poet’s defense of poetry as cultural maintenance: not decoration, but re-minting. In 19th-century Britain, where industrial repetition and social platitude often passed as wisdom, Smith is staking a claim for imaginative labor as a public service - making old truths spendable again.