Life & Wisdom Quote by William R. Benet

Poetry, Benet suggests, is a kind of sweet theft from something fundamentally dangerous. The line opens with a sensuous image - honey on lips - then twists the pleasure by admitting the source is poisoned. That pivot is the engine: it flatters the poet’s sensitivity while warning that the raw material of art is never pure. Life offers beauty, yes, but it also arrives laced with grief, corruption, compromise, and the slow toxicity of being awake to too much.

The intent feels less romantic than diagnostic. Benet isn’t selling poetry as escape; he’s casting it as extraction. The poet “imbibes” - a word that implies habit, even dependence. You don’t just taste; you drink. In that sense, writing becomes a voluntary intimacy with what harms you. The subtext is that the poet’s gift is also a liability: heightened perception means heightened exposure. If you can find honey in the mouth of the world, you also have to accept where that mouth has been.

Context matters: Benet wrote through the aftershocks of World War I, the disillusionment of modernism, and the churn of American public life between wars. His era distrusted easy uplift. This line takes that cultural mood and compresses it into a bodily metaphor: art isn’t made from sanitized inspiration but from contact with the contaminated real.

It works because it refuses purity. Poetry doesn’t redeem poison; it metabolizes it, turning injury, dread, and moral mess into something briefly sustaining - and never entirely safe.