Basil Bunting Quotes (11 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Poetry 3

Famous Basil Bunting Quotes

“He whom we anatomized
‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers
and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’
speaks
to us, hatching marrow,
broody all night over the bones of a deadman.”

Basil Bunting

from "Villon" (1930)

“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

I SUGGEST Advice to Young Poets Basili Bunting Poetry Archive, Durham University Library 190
I SUGGEST Advice to Young Poets

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

Basil Bunting

Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)

“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.”

Basil Bunting

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

“Mine was a threeplank bed whereon
I lay and cursed the weary sun.
They took away the prison clothes
and on the frosty nights I froze.
I had a Bible where I read
that Jesus came to raise the dead—
I kept myself from going mad
by singing an old bawdy ballad
and birds sang on my windowsill
and tortured me till I was ill”

Basil Bunting

from "Villon" (1930)

“Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.”

Basil Bunting

I SUGGEST Advice to Young Poets

Basil Bunting Quotes

“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”

Basil Bunting

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

“Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands,
the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb
alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate.
White gobs spitten for mockery;
and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me.”

Basil Bunting

from "Villon" (1930)

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

Basil Bunting

Gin the Goodwife Stint, from Odes I:14 (1930)

“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

Basil Bunting on Poetry ed Peter Makin, The Johns Hopkins University Press; New edition (1 Oct 2003) ISBN 978-0801877506

Music

“The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.”

Basil Bunting

from "Villon" (1930)

Death , Silence , Sea , Forgetting

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