Basil Bunting Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the exhilaration is incommunicable but 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
Can a moment of madness make up for
an age of consent?

Basil Bunting
To appreciate present conditions
collate them with those of antiquity.

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.

Basil Bunting
Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey's madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells' late spring.

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

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

Basil Bunting
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
A strong song tows us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know.

Basil Bunting
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.

Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.

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

Basil Bunting
I am shifting rivermist, not to be trusted.
I do not ask anything extraordinary of myself.
I like a nap after dinner
and to see the seasons come round in good order.

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

Basil Bunting
Sycamore seed twirling,
O, writhe to its measure!
Dust swirling trims pleasure.
Thorns prance in a gale.
In air snow flickers, twigs tap, elms drip.
Swaggering, shimmering fall, drench and towel us all!

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
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
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

Basil Bunting
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.

Basil Bunting
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone, its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith spun when the slowworm lay in her lap fifty years ago.

Basil Bunting
Gin the goodwife stint
and the bairns hunger
the Duke can get his rent
one year longer.

Basil Bunting
The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C. P. R. packet.

Basil Bunting
Man's life so little worth,
do we fear to take or lose it?
No ill companion on a journey, Death
lays his purse on the table and opens the wine.

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.

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

Basil Bunting
The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.

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.

Basil Bunting