Basil Bunting quotes:
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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.
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Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.
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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.
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Men are fools to invest in real estate.
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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.
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Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
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To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.
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Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166
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But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
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Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.
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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.
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The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.