Basil Bunting Quotes & Sayings

And always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on ... — Basil Bunting

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

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

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent? — 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. — Basil Bunting

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. — Basil Bunting

It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,
with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto
on scanty grass under great trees
where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.
It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.
It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta's
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.
It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upbraid
justly an unconvinced deserter. — Basil Bunting

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought. — Basil Bunting

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

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

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

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. — Basil Bunting

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself. — Basil Bunting

Men are fools to invest in real estate. — Basil Bunting

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

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166 — Basil Bunting

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. — Basil Bunting