“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
“Half a dozen slaps the time.”
Quoted in The fascist Salazar: Salazar and national-syndicalism: the story of a conflict, 1932-1935 - page 90, of John Medina - Published by Livraria Bertrand, 1978 - 249 pages
Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)
Statements
“We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”
"The wit and wisdom of Tony Banks" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4593562.stm, BBC News, 8 January 2006.
after a kiss-and-tell story appeared detailing how former Conservative minister David Mellor, his close friend and fellow Chelsea fan, wore football kit during sex.
“A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.”
On the heroines of Tales of the South Pacific (1947) in Commercial Appeal (31 December 1951)
“A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.”
"Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany", p. 24.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
