Basil Bunting Quotes

Basil Bunting's page is a funny mix of odd verses and hobby musings, perfect for a light-hearted read.

16 quotes

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

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

  3. Poetry? It's a hobby. I run model trains. Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. It's not work. You dont sweat. Nobody pays for it. You could advertise soap.

  4. 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.

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

  6. Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

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

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

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

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

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

  15. Men are fools to invest in real estate.

  16. 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.