Top Basil Bunting Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Basil Bunting Biography

Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud. He was an accomplished reader of his own work.

Read about Basil Bunting in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Basil Bunting Quotes

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

Months, Name, Names, Split, Splits

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.

Father, Fatherhood, Hate, Hectoring, Science, Spring

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

Heaped, Sand, Sifted, Silly, Thought, Wind

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

Duty, Hold, Line, Lines, Poet, Times

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.

Exists, Prose, Purpose, Wells

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.

Confusing, Confusion, Destructive, Infectious, Lifetime, Psychology

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

Antiquity, Appreciate, Conditions, Present

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

Banish, Determination, Fool, Fools, Idiot, Idiots

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Carry, Corkscrew, Preparation, Provide, Wine

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.

Jug, Jugs, Looks, Music, Sculpture, What Matters

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

Absorb, Anemia, Culture, Die, Islam, Sooner

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.

Ears, Explain, Head, Smart, Sound

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

Age, Madness, Moment, Temptation

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.

Cities, Home, Names, Nation, Praise

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Fool, Fools, Men, Real