Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham draws a hard line in the literary sand, and he does it with the cool authority of a man who made his name by mastering the very thing he’s supposedly demoting. “Can only” is the tell: not should, not might, but must. Prose, in this view, is the everyday traffic of meaning - competent, necessary, often admirable - yet ultimately obliged to yield when poetry enters, because poetry claims a different kind of sovereignty. The phrasing stages a little social drama: the prose writer “steps aside” like a pedestrian making room for a procession. That implied hierarchy flatters poetry while also protecting prose from comparison on poetry’s terms.

The subtext is less anti-prose than anti-pretension. Maugham was famous for clarity, for the well-made sentence that doesn’t call attention to itself. He distrusted literary mysticism and high-flown posturing, but he also knew that certain effects - compressed emotion, musicality, the shock of metaphor landing just so - can’t be achieved by prose without prose ceasing to be itself. So he turns the encounter into etiquette: prose is civilized enough to recognize when another art form is operating at full power.

Context matters. As a playwright and novelist working in an era that watched Modernism crown difficulty and poetic experiment, Maugham’s remark reads like a pragmatic concession to the avant-garde without signing up for it. Poetry gets the right-of-way; prose keeps the roads open. It’s not worship. It’s territorial respect from a working professional who understood both the limits and the quiet strengths of staying intelligible.