Jews From The United Kingdom

"I’ve always hated artificial flowers unless they were just flagrantly and beautifully, sort of brassily, artificial. But the good imitations, the ones that you think are real until you get up to them, and then there’s that awful dead plastic, are really vile. And the reason why I think they’re so vile is because so much of the beauty of a flower is in its very perishableness. One doesn’t want it to last forever, and accumulate dust."

"To leave the open fields and enter the forest,that was the rite. Knowing there was mystery, they could go. Go back now! And he receded among the multitude of forms, the twists and shadows they saw now, listening to the hum of the world's wood."

"I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock."

"By dawn he was gone. We have stood here since, in our new life. We have waited. He does not return."

"And I in terror but not in doubt of what I must do in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder — and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves, rolling the rocks away, breaking themselves out of their depths."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other"

"Levertov was the first poet I ever saw read, and that was actually over twenty years ago. She was very important to me. Partly as a model, as a woman up there reading, partly because she knows how to end the poem more effectively than anybody I know."

"I still hope for change, and believe work and prayer can produce results. I have a button that says Picket and Pray. There's still a chance to turn things around. Glasnost and Perestroika are what we need in the USA, just as much as in the Soviet Union-especially Perestroika! (1988)"

"Poetry is and should be part of resistance movements, including the anti-nuclear movement. (1984)"

"the real plague...the Nestle's executives and Nixons of the world; if you're looking for evil, that's where to look. (1983)"

"Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds — the indivisible shared out in endless abundance."

"All these He will swiftly lead to the Paradise road: they are safe. That done, there must take place that struggle no human presumes to picture: living, dying, descending to rescue the just from shadow, were lesser travails than this: to break through earth and stone of the faithless world back to the cold sepulcher, tearstained stifling shroud; to break from them back into breath and heartbeat, and walk the world again, closed into days and weeks again, wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit streaming through every cell of flesh so that if mortal sight could bear to perceive it, it would be seen His mortal flesh was lit from within, now, and aching for home. He must return, first, in Divine patience, and know hunger again, and give to humble friends the joy of giving Him food — fish and a honeycomb."

"Didmas, neighbor in death, Golgotha dust still streaked on the dried sweat of his body no one had washed and anointed, is here, for sequence is not known in Limbo; the promise, given from cross to cross at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn."

"Down through the tomb's inward arch He has shouldered out into Limbo to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber..."

"You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow. You the unchanging presence, in whom all moves and changes. How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain's heart the sapphire I know is there?"

"Not for one second will my self hold still, but wanders anywhere, everywhere it can turn. Not you, it is I am absent."

"Lord, not you, it is I who am absent."

"He himself must be the key, now, to the next door, the next terrors of freedom and joy."

"And not till he saw the angel had left him, alone and free to resume the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of what he had still to do, not till then did he recognize this was no dream."

"Delivered out of raw continual pain, smell of darkness, groans of those others to whom he was chained — unchained, and led past the sleepers, door after door silently opening — out!"

"I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'."

"pure dust that is all in all. Bless, weightless Spirit. Drink Caliban, push your tongue heavy into the calyx."

"Let Ariel learn a blessing for Caliban and Caliban drink dew from the lotus open upon the waters."

"Leaps of nerve, heart — cries of communion: if there is bliss, it has been already and will be; out- reaching, utterly. Blind to itself, flooded with otherness."

"all of us know he means we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source, pretend it's not there, cover over the mineshaft of passion"

"The poet never must lose despair."

"I am not joking. I'm speaking of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way."

"To serve the people, one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader. And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine, One must deeply imagine"

"To me it seems perhaps Kropotkin understood half of what we need to know, and Lenin perhaps knew half, and true revolution … true revolution must put these two halves together?"

"There is a fence around the garden but the gate stands open."

"The wind, the birds, do not sound poorer but clearer, recalling our agony, and the way we danced."

"Perhaps he will not return. But what we have lived comes back to us. We see more. We feel, as our rings increase, something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest leaf-tips further."

"It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost what he sought. It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood. And it is said his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing."

"… I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent."

"For Rothschild... the Avenue Marigny house was a home from home, but... I felt, a prison. Installed there, he was the the de facto if not the de jure head of the family. ...[H]is disposition was a curious, uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence. Somewhere between Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering about ever since. Embedded deep down in him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times lovable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent. Once when I was going to London he asked me to take over a case of brandy addressed in large letters to him at his English address. In the guard's van where it was put, among the porters who carried it, wherever it was seen or handled, it aroused an attitude of adoration, real or facetious, as though it had been some holy relic—the bones of a saint or a fragment of the True Cross. Even I partook of its glory, momentarily deputising for this Socialist millionaire, this Rabbinical sceptic, this epicurean ascetic, this Wise Man who had followed the wrong star and found his way to the wrong manger—one complete with chef, central heating and a lift. I think of him in the Avenue Marigny dictating innumerable memoranda, as though in the hope that, if only he dictated enough of them, one would say something; on a basis of the philosophical notion that three monkeys tapping away at typewriters must infallibly, if they keep at it long enough, ultimately tap out the Bible. Rothschild, anyway, did not lack for monkeys. After the war I caught glimpses of him at Cambridge, in think-tanks, once in the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv, still dictating memoranda."

"The more you are talked about the less powerful you are."

"I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfilment."

"The "landed interest" and its possibilities always fired the imagination of Disraeli... In Disraeli the agricultural landlords had the most eloquent champion of their class and cause that England or any other country has ever seen. Disraeli believed in them more than some of them believed in him, and was not ashamed to say so. "Good-bye, my dear lord," said he at the end of a visit to one of the stately homes of England, "you have shown me the finest spectacle these islands can afford—a great nobleman living at home among his own people." What could be better?"

"Sybil can be read now as the production of a future Conservative Prime Minister, and hence in the narrow sense as a political novel. The elements of political pleading are indeed evident in any reading of it. Their curiosity, their partisanship and their opportunism are matched only by their brilliance of address. The novel would be fascinating if it were only political. The stucco elegance of Disraeli’s writing has a consonance with one kind of political argument. What is intolerable in his descriptions of persons and feelings becomes in his political flights a rather likeable panache. The descriptions of industrial squalor are very like those of Dickens on Coketown: brilliant romantic generalizations—the view from the train, from the hustings, from the printed page—yet often moving, like all far-seeing rhetoric. There are similar accounts of the conditions of the agricultural poor which need to be kept in mind against the misleading contrasts of North and South. Again, in a quite different manner, there is in Sybil the most spirited description of the iniquities of the tommy-shop, and of the practical consequences of the system of truck, to be found anywhere. Disraeli's anger—the generalized anger of an outsider making his way—carries him often beyond his formal text. The hostile descriptions of London political and social life are again generalization, but they have, doubtless, the same rhetorical significance as those of the forays among the poor. Anyone who is prepared to give credit to Disraeli's unsupported authority on any matter of social fact has of course mistaken his man, as he would similarly mistake Dickens. But Disraeli, like Dickens, is a very fine generalizing analyst of cant, and almost as fine a generalizing rhetorician of human suffering. Both functions, it must be emphasized, are reputable."

"He looked to national consensus in the 1830s and again in the 1870s; it does not follow that the intermediate decades were consistent. In the 1840s, Young England was more about social cohesion than national identity... It was only in the 1870s that the two themes of social cohesion and national identity were finally integrated... Many Conservative parties elsewhere failed to make the crucial move from élite parties to mass parties, partly because they did not have a brand image, or not one that could be put across in popular terms. It is to Disraeli's mental footwork as much as anything that the Conservatives owe their survival."

"Disraeli was a racial thinker. He thought race "the key of history". "All is race", he wrote; "All is race; there is no other truth", said Sidonia. Race, for him, transcended everything: it explained religion; it explained politics. Disraeli was far more of a racial thinker than a social or religious thinker... Disraeli's racial doctrine went the whole hog. Not only was race the key to history, but some races were far superior to others. There were master races, and there were the rest. Their superiority was a biological matter rather than just a cultural one, and depended on purity of blood. Interbreeding caused racial degeneration. If such doctrines ring oddly today, let us recall that they were advanced for the best of reasons: to raise a downtrodden people, the Jews, in the esteem of mankind, and to raise them, moreover, not to equality, but to a position of hardly deserved superiority among the nations. Disraeli was unusual not because he used the common coin of pseudo-scientific racial thought, but because he used it for Jewish (and therefore, in the circumstances, virtuous) ends. Disraeli said little about the lower races; his object was to praise, not to disparage. There was an absence of malign intent. Still, Disraeli believed that to think racially was to be modern and scientific."

"The present man will do well, and will be particularly loyal and anxious to please me in every way. He is vy. peculiar, but vy. clever and sensible and vy. conciliatory."

"Disraeli has become a code name for "collectivist" or, as they now put it, rather inaccurately, "corporatist" policies. He is the mascot of the "wets". This is a grievous distortion of history. It is true that, in his romantic youth, he wrote the only phrase which the majority of his present-day admirers have ever read from his pen – about there being a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor. His paternalism, however, was superficial. In so far as he ever favoured authoritarian measures for the defence of what are now ludicrously called the "under-privileged" he favoured them not so much in the name of abstract social justice as in that of national cohesion. What he believed in was the Nation which he tended in those benighted days to call the Race. This is his one, valid, surviving contribution to Conservative thinking. He was an imperialist."

"In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand. Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks."

"Mr. Gladstone ranked Disraeli as the greatest master of parliamentary wit that had ever been. He looked upon his character as a great mystery, and it pained him to feel that the mystery will never be solved."

"What distinguished Lord Beaconsfield from the ordinary Tory leaders was his readiness to trust the English people whom they did not trust, and his total indifference to the barriers of caste, which for them were the be-all and end-all of politics. In the inarticulate mass of the English populace which they held at arm's length he discerned the Conservative working man, as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in a block of marble. He understood that the common Englishman, even when he personally has nothing to guard beyond a narrow income and a frugal home, has yet Conservative instincts as strong as those of the wealthiest peer."

"Disraeli was an artist in politics, whose principal achievement was his own career. But he had an imaginative appreciation of the nature of political power which no one in his generation could match... The majesty of power Disraeli saw as a genuine element in the world. Thus, to approach it with some show of pomp and circumstance was not to indulge in theatrical nonsense—even if admitting that it was a show. When he spoke of jewels in the imperial diadem, Conservative members would say that this was just Dizzy's way, but he was putting into words for them romantically patriotic convictions that they themselves would never express... Sir Henry Lawrence...had once written that it was 'the due admixture of Romance and Reality that best carries a man through life'. Disraeli seemed to know what that precise admixture should be. It was this inner sureness of touch and grasp, this mastery of occasion, that had carried him against all odds into the command of the political ideas of so many dukes, squires, soldiers, lawyers, brewers, and private gentlemen. Disraeli, his party felt, dumbly but truly, knew what politics were about."

"The real hit of the congress was the personal tie between Bismarck and Beaconsfield. No doubt Bismarck flattered "the old Jew" in order to extract concessions for Russia's benefit. But the mutual affection was genuine. The two men recognised their common qualities... Each admired the actor in the other, and characteristically each noted the beauty of the other's voice. Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege—Bismarck as a boorish Junker, Disraeli as a Jew; both had a profound contempt for political moralising. Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said of himself: "My temperament is dreamy and sentimental. People who paint me all make the mistake of giving me a violent expression"? Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said on becoming prime minister: "Well, I've climbed to the top of the greasy pole"? In politics both men had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism or, in the English phrase, "to dish the Whigs". Both genuinely advocated social reform; Disraeli had once defended protective tariffs. Both used foreign success to strengthen their position at home. When Bismarck was told of the British occupation of Cyprus, he exclaimed: "This is progress! It will be popular: a nation loves progress!" Beaconsfield was annoyed at having the words taken out of his mouth and commented sourly: "His idea of progress obviously consists in taking something from somebody else"—an idea which Beaconsfield had made the basis of Tory policy."

"No doubt Bismarck and Disraeli dominated the Congress of Berlin, and equally there is no doubt that Disraeli found Bismarck a fascinating and bizarre figure. Bismarck behaved in an unusual way to Disraeli as well. He called upon him, something he never did after he achieved his great status, and he invited him to a family dinner, a confidence accorded to literally no other foreign statesman."

"Disraeli, like his successors, saw society in terms of a trust, drawing its cohesion from the observance of mutual obligations and its rulers ready to employ where necessary the huge engine of government to promote the wellbeing of the people. Toryism needed—and needs—to identify itself with forces and feelings making for stability, the preservation of national institutions and the enlargement of national prestige."