Quotes by Basil Bunting

Quotes 1 till 11 of 11.

• 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.

  Source: On Poetry

  ― Basil Bunting
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• But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

  ― Basil Bunting
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• Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

  ― Basil Bunting
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• Gin the goodwife stint
  and the bairns hunger
  the Duke can get his rent
  one year longer.

  Source: Odes Gin the Goodwife Stint, I:14

  ― Basil Bunting
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• Poetry? It's a hobby.
  I run model trains.
  Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
  It's not work. You don't sweat.
  Nobody pays for it.
  You could advertise soap.

  Source: Odes What The Chairman Told Tom, II:6

  ― Basil Bunting
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• Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

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

  Source: Odes Gin the Goodwife Stint, I:14

  ― Basil Bunting
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• 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.

  ― Basil Bunting
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• To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

  ― Basil Bunting
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• 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.

  ― Basil Bunting
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• 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

  Source: Odes What The Chairman Told Tom, II:6

  ― Basil Bunting
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Subjects in these quotes:

• determination
• schoolteacher
• exhilaration
• destructive
• psychology
• appreciate

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