English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin.
No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.
Love at first sight’some say misnaming Discovery of twinned helplessness Against the huge tug of procreation. But friendship at first sight? This also Catches fiercely at the surprised heart So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.
I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
What we now call “finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
With eager dragon-eyes;.
The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.
The poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.