Art & Creativity Quote by John Drinkwater

Drinkwater is trying to shut down a habit that critics can’t quite quit: treating poetry like a museum wing with neat labels and velvet ropes. His phrase "the best words in the best order" (a famous definition, often linked to Coleridge) isn’t just a compliment to craft; it’s a provocation. He insists that what makes a poem a poem is not its subject matter, moral purpose, or historical period, but the achieved arrangement of language under pressure - "finished art" forged by "conditions" that are partly technical (meter, tone, diction) and partly human (temperament, era, constraint).

The subtext is defensive and democratic at once. Defensive, because early 20th-century poetry was being carved up by schools and manifestos: Georgians versus Modernists, "traditional" versus "experimental", high seriousness versus popular appeal. As a Georgian poet, Drinkwater had reason to resist being filed away as merely "pastoral" or "outdated". Democratic, because he’s arguing that the essence of poetry can’t be quarantined by category. A great line doesn’t ask permission from genre before it lands; it lands because the language is inevitable.

Why it works rhetorically: he uses the authority of an aphorism, then refuses the bureaucracy that usually follows. The dash to "poetry" is a snap judgment, a critic’s hammer blow. The final clause - "to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible" - reads like a rebuke to gatekeeping dressed up as taxonomy. He’s making an aesthetic claim, but also a cultural one: classification is often how institutions launder taste into rule.