Quotes from 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.

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.

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

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.

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,its tremulous thread spun in the hurricanespider floss on my cheek; light from the zenithspun when the slowworm lay in her lapfifty years ago.

A strong song towsus, long earsick.Blind, we followrain slant, spray flickto fields we do not know.

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

It is easier to die than to remember.

Brag, sweet tenor bull,descant on Rawthey's madrigal,each pebble its partfor the fells' late spring.

Pens are too light.Take a chisel to write.

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!

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.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

The mason stirs. Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

Poet appointed dare not decline to walk among the bogus...

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

I am shifting rivermist, not to be trusted.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.