If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Said the Sun to the Moon-’When you are but a lonely white crone, And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood, Remember only this of our hopeless love That never till Time is done Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.
Still falls the rain – dark as the world of man, black as our loss – blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.
My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
I’m not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.
If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.
My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don’t! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
I’m dying, but otherwise I’m in very good health.
Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.
What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.
What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.
By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.
I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart...
Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.