British Poet Quotes

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace—
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice.
But then I had a thought that brought me hope—
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.

Justin Richardson (poet)

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

Because I longed to comprehend the infinite I drew a line between the known and unknown.

Elizabeth Bartlett

I once knew a man out of courtesy help a lame dog over a stile, and he for requital bit his fingers.

William Chillingworth

Forget. Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself.

The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.

Anyone happy in this age and place Is daft or corrupt. Better to abdicate From a material and spiritual terrain Fit only for barbarians.

When nothing was, then God was there,
Had nothing been God would have been;
My being has defeated me,
Had I not been, what would have been.

There's nothing in the world (that is in Trinity) To make us poets happy; — I detest Your Hebrew, Greek and heathenish Latinity, And Mathematics are a bore at best.

John Moultrie (poet)

Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

George Mackay Brown

They went to the north, they went to the south, And into the west went they, Till they found a civil, civil engineer, And unto him did say: "Now tell to us, thou civil engineer, If this be fit to drink." And they showed him a cup of the town water, Which was as black as ink.

Robert Fuller Murray

Your worship is your furnaces, Which, like old idols, lost obscenes, Have molten bowels; your vision is Machines for making more machines.

Gordon Bottomley

Let brisker youths their active nerves prepare
Fit their light silken wings and skim the buxom air.

Richard Owen Cambridge

That thorny path, those stormy skies, have drawn our spirits nearer; and rendered us, by sorrow's ties, each to the other dearer.

Spring sits and shivers at the porch of light : April goes weeping on her road to May.

John Warren, 3rd Baron de Tabley

Wouldst thou view the Lion's den? Search afar from haunts of men — Where the reed-encircled rill, Oozes from the rocky hill, By its verdure far descried 'Mid the desert brown and wide.