Basil Bunting quotes

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself. (Basil Bunting)

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Basil Bunting

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Basil Bunting

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

Basil Bunting

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Basil Bunting

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."

Basil Bunting

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

Basil Bunting

Mine was a threeplank bed whereon I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead- I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill.

Basil Bunting

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.

Basil Bunting

He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things' speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman.

Basil Bunting

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap. (Basil Bunting)

Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands, the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate. White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me.

Basil Bunting

The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note.

Basil Bunting

Who says it's poetry, anyhow? My ten year old can do it and rhyme. Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher, he ought to know. Go and find work.

Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting

Occupation: British Poet
Born: March 1, 1900
Died: April 17, 1985
Quotes count: 14
Wikipedia: Basil Bunting

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