Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by Basil Bunting

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British poet Basil Bunting.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist tradition in English. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud. He was an accomplished reader of his own work.

British - Poet | March 3, 1900 - 1985

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

Basil Bunting

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

Basil Bunting

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Basil Bunting

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

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

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Basil Bunting

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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