No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be … - Robert Graves

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Some think that people come to a ball to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after someone else's wife.

Robert Graves

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Dream, Fact, Facts, Poetic, Thing, Wakened

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There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

Good Writing, Rewriting, Thing, Writing

Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.

Account, Answer, Believe, Children, Functions, Religious

The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

Academic, Differences, Emotional, Long, Poetic, Simple

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

Money, Poetry, Writing

We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in the trenches, taken by nationalities. We agreed on a descending-order like this: English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians; Irish and German Catholics; Scots; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portugese; Belgians; French. We put the Belgians and French there for spite; they could not have been dirtier than the Algerians and the Portugese.

Irish, Order, Spite, Taken, Troops, War