Poets From England

"Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life."

""The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art."

"No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education."

"They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revelation of the inherent character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person projecting this particular image."

"This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness."

"One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is."

"One of the curious psychological facts, in connection with the various ways in which various minds function, is the fact that when in these days we seek to visualize, in some pictorial manner, our ultimate view of life, the images which are called up are geometrical or chemical rather than anthropomorphic. It is probable that even the most rational and logical among us as soon as he begins to philosophize at all is compelled by the necessity of things to form in the mind some vague pictorial representation answering to his conception of the universe. Most minds see the universe of their mental conception as something quite different from the actual stellar universe upon which we all gaze. Even the most purely rational minds who find the universe in "pure thought" are driven against their rational will to visualize this "pure thought" and to give it body and form and shape and movement."

"My answer to the question "Why do we philosophize?" is as follows. We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is a philosophical animal.… We may be as sceptical as we please. Our very scepticism is the confession of an implicit philosophy."

"The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism."

"It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth."

"Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."

"Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question."

"Man is the animal who weeps and laughs — and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book."

"I have been reading of late, most carefully, oh such an exciting mass of Anarchist Literature sent to me by old Emma Goldman who is my Prime Minister & chief Political Philosopher! and every week I get the anarchist paper from Avenue A New York City and also the ‘Bulletin of Information’ from the Anarchists of Barcelona. This latter pamphlet I am carefully keeping; because it is not so much concerned with the war as with their experiment in Catalonia of organizing their life on Anarchist lines and getting rid of all Dictatorship & of the ‘Sovereign State’."

"If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose."

"The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways."

"Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials."

"Si est del riche orguillus: Ja del povre n'avra merci Pur sa pleinte ne pur sun cri; Mes se cil s'en peüst vengier, Dunc le verreit l'um suzpleier."

"Mes ki ne mustre s'enferté A peine en peot aver santé: Amur est plaie dedenz cors, E si ne piert nïent defors. Ceo est un mal que lunges tient, Pur ceo que de nature vient."

"Amur n'est pruz se n'est egals."

"Ki divers cunte veut traitier, Diversement deit comencier E parler si rainablement K'il seit pleisibles a la gent."

"Tutes les dames de une tere Vendreit il meuz d'amer requere Quë un fol de sun pan tolir; Kar cil volt an eire ferir."

"D'euls deus fu il tut autresi Cume del chevrefoil esteit Ki a la codre se perneit: Quant il s'i est laciez e pris Ensemble poënt bien durer; Mes ki puis les volt deservrer, Li codres muert hastivement E li chevrefoil ensement. "Bele amie, si est de nus: Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!""

"Tel cinc cent parolent d'amur, N'en sevent pas le pior tur, Ne que est loiax druerie."

"Se l'uns des amans est loiax, E li autre est jalox è faus, Si est amors entr'ex fausée, Ne puet avoir lunge durée. Amors n'a soing de compagnun, Boin amors n'est se de Dex nun, De cors en cors, de cuer en cuer, Autrement n'est prex à nul fuer. Tulles qui parla d'amistié, Dist assés bien en son ditié, Que vent amis, ce veut l'amie Dunt est boine la compaignie, S'ele le veut è il l'otreit. Dunt la druerie est à dreit, Puisque li uns l'autre desdit, N'i a d'amors fors c'un despit; Assés puet-um amors trover, Mais sens estuet al' bien garder, Douçour è francise è mesure."

"Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as "" in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkien's later, but more celebrated, work, The Hobbit (1937), for its "hobbit-ish" sounding names and settings. .... Perhaps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem (1919), published by Virginia Woolf's , written in what scholars consider a "" style. ... But, "high" can sometimes be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it's decidedly misleading."

"The year after ’s death Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, and for the next twenty or so years lived with her mother in , London and later . (TS Eliot staying with them during the war?) For many years Mirrlees worked on a Harrison biography that was never published. She also planned a many volume biography of the 17th century antiquarian , and published the first volume as A Fly in Amber (, 1962). After her mother’s death in 1948, Mirrlees moved to South Africa, a country she had visited as a child due to her father’s business interests, and lived there for fifteen years. She returned to England in 1963, settling in the Oxford suburb of , and published three slim poetry volumes in the sixties and early seventies, revised and expanded in Moods and Tensions (Amate Press, 1976). Mirrlees died in 1978 at the age of ninety-one."

"Pride and resentment are not indigenous in the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive."

"Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he never can tell."

"Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party."

"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't."

"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."

"You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women."

"I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks."

"Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion."

"Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about."

"I have to confess that I felt rather proud of the simple device of my suffocating cloud. The Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front, bringing mental magic to modern armament."

"I, Christopher Logue, was baptized the year Many thousands of Englishmen, Fists clenched, their bellies empty, Walked day and night on the capital city."

"Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew."

"The ones we choose to love become our anchor when the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays."

"Said Marx, "Don't be snobbish, we seek to abolish The 3rd class, not the 1st.""

"Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting."

"This pen's all I have of ."

"And sorrowing I to see the sommer flowers, The lively greene, the lusty lease, forlorne, The sturdy trees so shattred with the showers, The fieldes so fade, that florisht so beforne: It taught mee well, all earthly things be borne To dye the death: for nought long time may last: The sommer's beauty yeeldes to winter's blast."

"His drinke, the running streame, his cup, the bare Of his palme cloasde, his bed, the hard cold ground: To this poore life was Misery ybound."

"Crookebackt hee was, toothshaken, and blere eyed, Went on three feete, and somtyme, crept on fowre, With olde lame boanes, that ratled by his syde, His scalpe all pild, and hee with eld forlore: His withred fist still knocking at Death's dore, Fumbling, and driveling, as hee drawes his breath, For briefe, the shape and messenger of Death."

"The wrathfull winter proching on apace, With blustering blasts had all ybarde the treene, And olde Saturnus, with his frosty face With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene."

"Thou sorrow, venom Elfe. Is this thy play, To spin a web out of thyselfe To Catch a Fly? For Why? [...] To tangle Adams race In's stratigems To their Destructions, spoil'd, made base By venom things Damn'd Sins."

"Am I new minted by thy Stamp indeed? Mine Eyes are dim; I cannot clearly see. Be thou my Spectacles that I may read Thine Image and Inscription stampt on mee."

"So in this way of writing without thinking, Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking."