Life & Wisdom Quote by Bliss Carman

Facts are supposed to be the hard furniture of reality, but Carman treats them as something closer to a handshake: provisional, social, and a little lazy. Calling facts “compromises” reframes knowledge not as discovery but as negotiation, the point where curiosity meets fatigue, funding, politics, etiquette, or simple consensus. The sting is in “agreed.” Truth, in this view, isn’t only what the world is; it’s what a community decides is stable enough to build on.

As a poet writing in the long shadow of Victorian certainty and into the early 20th century’s epistemic shake-ups (Darwin’s aftershocks, new psychology, modernist doubt), Carman is less interested in debunking reality than in puncturing complacency. The line targets the social life of certainty: how “facts” can become a rhetorical badge that ends arguments, disciplines dissent, and protects the comfort of settled stories. “Let investigation cease” reads like an accusation. We don’t stop because the mystery is solved; we stop because stopping is useful.

The subtext is a warning about intellectual closure disguised as rigor. Carman suggests that what we call a fact often functions as a truce between competing explanations, a boundary marker declaring the cost of further inquiry too high. That’s why the quote still lands in a culture that loves “evidence-based” everything while constantly arguing over what counts as evidence. It doesn’t deny facts; it demands we notice who benefits when we treat them as endpoints rather than waystations.