Basil Bunting Quotes

• Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

  Basil Bunting

  Wine, Preparation

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Smart, Sound, Ears

  8 Copy quote

• Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

  Basil Bunting

  Silly, Wind, Sand

  1925 Villon, pt.1.

  6 Copy quote

• Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

  Basil Bunting

  Islam, Culture, Anemia

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, Faber & Faber

  72 Copy quote

• Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

  Basil Bunting

  Home, Cities, Names

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, p.48, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

  Basil Bunting

  Determination, Fool, Idiot

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, p.66, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

  Basil Bunting

  Purpose, Wells, Prose

  Basil Bunting (1994). “Three Essays”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  What Matters, Jugs, Looks

  Basil Bunting (1999). “Basil Bunting on Poetry”

  8 Copy quote

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

  Basil Bunting

  Appreciate, Conditions, Antiquity

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, p.12, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

  Basil Bunting

  Father, Hate, Spring

  7 Copy quote

• The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

  Basil Bunting

  Lines, Poet, Duty

  4 Copy quote

• Men are fools to invest in real estate.

  Basil Bunting

  Real, Men, Fool

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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• Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

  Basil Bunting

  Names, Splits, Months

  1966 Briggflatts.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Basil Bunting

  Temptation, Age, Madness

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Confusion, Psychology, Confusing

  8 Copy quote

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