Quotes

Poetry is a way of thought--non-intellectual, anti-decorative thought at that--rather than an art.

I am not a Greek scholar or an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a comparative mythologist, but I have a good nose and a sense of touch, and think I have connected a lot of mythical patterns which were not connected before, Classical faculties will hate me, and I will get a lot of sniffy reviews.

I thought of going back to France, but realized the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.

Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of a man who deserves them.

Philosophy is anti-poetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage.

Take your delight in momentariness, / Walk between dark and dark - a shining space / With the grave's narrowness, though not its peace.

The child alone a poet is / Spring and Fairyland are his / Truth and Reason show but dim, / and all's poetry with him.

It doesn't matter what's the cause, / What wrong they say we're righting, / A curse for treaties, bonds and laws, / When we're to do the fighting!

As you are woman, so be lovely / As you are lovely, so be various / Merciful as constant, constant as various / So be mine, as I yours for ever.

War was return of earth to ugly earth / War was foundering of sublimities / Extinction of each happy art and faith / By which the world had still kept head in air.

On his time in World War 1: Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

Poet, never chase the dream / Laugh yourself and turn away / Mask your hunger, let it seem / small matter if he come or stay / But when he nestles in your hand at last / close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.

Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery.