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. View quote
Basil Bunting
To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity. View quote
Basil Bunting
Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent? View quote
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. View quote
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." View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Basil Bunting
Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Basil Bunting
The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. View quote
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. View quote
Basil Bunting