Poets From England

"It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better."

"The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.""

"The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy."

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you."

"The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it."

"I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt."

"What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing."

"There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best."

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.""

"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this."

"Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers."

"The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion."

"What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time."

"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be."

"Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time."

"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how."

"All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible."

"Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing and the Children of Violence series. That again was actually a very positive influence upon me. I particularly liked her writing in the Children of Violence series: so down-to-earth and real! It made me think that this is the material that I have. It just relates to ordinary people that live ordinary lives, but, if Doris Lessing thinks it's important enough to record and the world agrees with her, then maybe I can use that same kind of material as well to make the points that I think should be made."

"This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we — we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything."

"My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed."

"None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it."

"Every man loves what he is good at."

"Love quickly is pall'd, Tho' with labour 'tis gain'd; Wine never does cloy Tho' with ease 'tis obtain'd. We sing while you sigh, We laugh while you weep; Love robs you of rest, Wine lulls us asleep."

"And wit's the noblest frailty of the mind."

"The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world."

"I am, out of the ladies' company, like a fish out of the water."

"Do not doubt him who tells you he is afraid, but be afraid of him who tells you he has no doubts."

"I thought that the poets in the anthologies were the only real poets, that their being in the anthologies was proof of this, though some were classified as "great" and others as "minor." I owed much to those anthologies: Silver Pennies; the constant outflow of volumes edited by Louis Untermeyer; The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children; Palgrave's Golden Treasury; the Oxford Book of English Verse. But I had no idea that they reflected the taste of a particular time or of particular kinds of people."

"Our hope is less to last through Art than deeper searching of the heart, than broader range of uttered truth."

"Shakespeare's stage must hold the glass to every age."

"A thousand forms and passions glow Upon the world-wide canvas. So With larger scope our art we ply; And if the crown be harder won, Diviner rays around it run, With strains of fuller harmony."

"There is a garden where lilies And roses are side by side; And all day between them in silence The silken butterflies glide."

"I may not enter the garden, Though I know the road thereto; And morn by morn to the gateway I see the children go."

"Kiss and cling to them, kiss and leave them, Bright and beguiling:— Bright and beguiling, as She who glances Along the shore and the meadows along, And sings for heart's delight, and dances Crowned with apples, and ruddy, and strong:— Can we see thee, and not remember Thy sun-brown cheek and hair sun-golden, O sweet September?"

"They bring back light on their faces; But they cannot bring back to me What the lilies say to the roses, Or the songs of the butterflies be."

"The monument outlasting bronze was promised well by bards of old."

"Sleep puts out silent fingers, And leads me back to the roar Of the dead salt sea that vomits Wrecks of the past ashore."

"I see the lost Love in beauty Go gliding over the main: I feel the ancient sweetness, The worm and the wormwood again."

"Let the children play And sit like flowers upon thy grave And crown with flowers,—that hardly have A briefer blooming-tide than they."

"Earth all one tomb lies round me, Domed with an iron sky: And God Himself in His power, God cannot save me! I cry."

"The azure lake is argent now Beneath the pale moonshine: I seek a sign of hope in heaven: Fair Polestar! thou are mine. A thousand other beacons blaze; I follow thee alone..."

"In the season of white wild roses We two went hand in hand: But now in the ruddy autumn Together already we stand."

"With the cry I wake;—and around me The mother and child at her feet Breathe peace in even whispers; And the night falls heavy and sweet."

"Time's corrosive dewdrop eats The giant warrior to a crust Of earth in earth and rust in rust."

"This little Collection differs, it is believed, from others in the attempt made to include in it all the best original lyrical pieces and songs in our language, by writers not living, and none besides the best. The Editor will regard as his fittest readers those who love poetry so well, that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued."

"When once the mind has raised itself to grasp and to delight in excellence, those who love most will be found to love most wisely."

"In the hollow Silver voices ripple and cry Follow, O follow!"

"Follow, O follow!—and we follow"

"The Sun whispers, O remember! You have but thirty days to run, O sweet September!"

"To Morris we owe poetry whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision has not been excelled in the literature of our country, and by the revival of the decorative arts he has given to our individualised romantic movement the social idea and the social factor also."