Education Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater is fencing off poetry from the courtroom and putting it back where it belongs: in the messy jurisdiction of taste. The line rejects the fantasy that a lyric can be “proven” great the way a theorem can be proven true. You can count stresses, map the rhyme, praise the compression, but none of that forces the final verdict. What seals the case is “conviction” - a word that sounds both rational and emotional, as if aesthetic judgment is a belief you arrive at after evidence, not a whim you stumble into.

The subtext is a quiet defense of criticism at a moment when modernity was pressuring the arts to justify themselves with something harder than feeling. Drinkwater, a Georgian poet writing in the shadow of Modernism’s new machinery, understands the temptation to reduce beauty to technique: show your workings, quantify your excellence, certify the “best words” like a stamped product. He refuses. “Accepted by our knowledge and judgment” insists that subjectivity isn’t the enemy of seriousness; it’s the medium. Taste is trained. Conviction is earned.

The reference to Blake matters. Blake’s lyrics often feel inevitable - simple, sung, like they existed before the page. Drinkwater’s point is that inevitability can’t be audited. It’s a shared recognition among readers with enough linguistic experience to feel when language locks into place. The sentence flatters no one: if you don’t feel that lock, it’s not because the proof is missing; it’s because the apprenticeship of attention is.