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