nydaa.blogg.se - Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).

They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identity and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage.

The Paris Review, "Writers at Work: 4th series," interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969).

Once it had been written, the world would end.

Quoted in The Observer (6 December 1964).The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good."Mammon" an address at the London School of Economics (6 December 1963) published in Mammon and the Black Goddess (1965).Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.Lecture at Oxford as quoted in Time (15 December 1961).I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.Reply to questionnaire, "The Cost of Letters" in Horizon (September 1946).To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Quotes The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good. 1.8 The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943).