Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

A chill runs through Forster's crisp sentence because it stages neglect as etiquette. "We are not concerned" is the voice of the cultivated "we" - the comfortable classes who can afford to treat poverty as background noise. The brutality lands in the next move: the very poor are "unthinkable". Not merely ignored, they are positioned outside ordinary moral imagination, beyond the radius of dinner-table conversation and liberal concern. Forster isn't endorsing this; he's exposing the social reflex that makes deprivation feel like a category error, something that doesn't belong in the same room as decent people.

The kicker is the division of labor: "only to be approached by the statistician or the poet". Those are the sanctioned mediators, the professionals who can render misery either legible (numbers, charts, policy) or safely aesthetic (lyric suffering, noble poor). Both approaches create distance. Statistics risk flattening lives into data points; poetry risks converting pain into a consumable experience for readers who remain untouched. Forster's irony is surgical: the very tools that claim to help us "approach" the poor can also protect us from encountering them as neighbors with demands, voices, and agency.

Context matters. Forster wrote against the grain of Edwardian respectability and class compartmentalization, when "good taste" doubled as social policing. The line reads like a diagnosis of a society that prefers representation over relationship - a modern problem, too, whenever poverty is treated as a dashboard metric or a prestige documentary rather than a political emergency.