It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Atkinson’s remark is a sardonic critique of higher education when it becomes narrowly credentialist or overly devoted to “knowledge” as mere information. The idea of “recovering” suggests that college can temporarily dull independent judgment or imaginative perception by rewarding conformity and rote mastery. His second clause restores balance: poetry—standing for imagination, metaphor, emotional intelligence, and the arts—does not decorate thought but helps constitute it. In this view, mature thinking requires more than facts; it needs the interpretive, humane capacities that poetry trains: sensitivity to language, ambiguity, and the complexity of experience.