William Plomer Quotes

William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE was a South African and British author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor.

✵ 10. December 1903 – 21. September 1973

William Plomer: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous William Plomer Quotes

“When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin
She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin:
An abstemious man would reel at her look
As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.”

William Plomer

"Slightly Foxed", line 25.
The Dorking Thigh, and Other Satires

“His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six.”

William Plomer

Philip Larkin, in The Guardian, June 10, 1960.
Criticism

“Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew
And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too,
D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S.,
Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!”

William Plomer

"Slightly Foxed", line 33.
The Dorking Thigh, and Other Satires

“Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed
Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,
When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,
And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind.”

William Plomer

"Father and Son: 1939", line 73.
The Dorking Thigh, and Other Satires

“The commonplace needs no defence,
Dullness is in the critic’s eyes,
Without a licence life evolves
From some dim phase its own surprise;

Under these yellow-twinkling elms,
Behind these hedges trimly shorn,
As in a stable once, so here
It may be born, it may be born.”

William Plomer

"The Bungalows", line 45, from A Shot in the Park (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955).

“His poetry may be divided into comic extravaganza on the one hand, and more personal work on the other. There is no one like him in the world in the former genre; as a "light poet" he is preferable to John Betjeman – as fluent in traditional forms, his work is never vitiated by refuge in the poetical or high sentimental, and his choice of words is subtler, funnier and altogether sharper. In his other vein Plomer is fastidious, reticent, elegant and the author of some memorable and moving lines.”

William Plomer

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1973] 1975) vol. 1, p. 389.
Criticism

“A family portrait not too stale to record
Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord,
Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword,
And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad:
Just like an old liberal
Between the wars.”

William Plomer

"Father and Son: 1939", line 1.
The Dorking Thigh, and Other Satires

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