Quotes About Tradition

Most people are trying to go digital, and trying to do different things with poetry. McSweeney's is going in the opposite direction - going more classic, and retro, which is all coming back.

Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, and perfected by music.

There were poets before Homer.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.

Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

We can understand poetry from a billion - in a billion styles, experiment, tradition, combination, spice, meter, image. It's all there for the poet and for the listener and for all of us.

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

The British Constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed.

It's like being at the kids' table at Thanksgiving - you can put your elbows on it, you don't have to talk politics... no matter how old I get, there's always a part of me that's sitting there.

I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

You can hardly say boo to a goose in the House of Commons now without cries of "Ungentlemanly," "Not fair" and all the rest.

I deliver very traditionally, and people aren't threatened. I think if I cursed or seemed wilder, I couldn't get away with the amount of very opinionated politics I get away with.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.