A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Accurate accounts are rare poetry because common sense often gives a shallow view.
- In plain terms
- True facts can be poetic, but are are rare.
- What can you take from it?
- Seek depth beyond superficial common sense.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- When have you found a simple fact to be profound?
Another view
Depth can be subjective and hard to measure.
More from Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness betwee…
Permalink to quote #93 Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.
Permalink to quote #95 Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.
Permalink to quote #92
Related quotes
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth:but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
Laura RidingLaura Riding quote #5 Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave FlaubertGustave Flaubert quote #7 Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is t…
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge quote #18