Poets From England

"His heart runs away with his head."

"And, on the label of the stuff, He wrote this verse; Which one would think was clear enough, And terse:— When taken, To be well shaken."

"Lord help you! Tell ’em Queen Anne's dead."

"Oh, London is a fine town, A very famous city, Where all the streets are paved with gold, And all the maidens pretty."

"Not to be sneezed at."

"On their own merits modest men are dumb."

"Like two single gentlemen rolled into one."

"My father was an eminent button maker — but I had a soul above buttons — I panted for a liberal profession."

"Praise the bridge that carried you over."

"And once again the scene was chang’d, New earth there seem’d to be, I saw the Holy City Beside the tideless sea; The light of God was on its streets, The gates were open wide, And all who would might enter, And no one was denied. No need of moon or stars by night, Or sun to shine by day, It was the new Jerusalem, That would not pass away."

"Roses are shining in Picardy In the hush of the silver dew; Roses are flowering in Picardy But there's never a rose like you. And the roses will die with the summer time And our roads may be far apart, But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy; 'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart."

"Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side, The summer's gone, and all the roses falling, It's you, it's you must go, and I must bide."

"I stand in a land of roses, But I dream of a land of snow, Where you and I were happy, In the years of long ago."

"Oh, we'm come up from Somerset, Where the cider apples grow, We'm come to see your Majesty, An' how the world do go. And when you're wanting anyone, If you'll kindly let us know, We'll all come up from Somerset, Because we loves you so!"

"I have knelt in the mighty temples, But the dumb gods make no sign; They cannot speak to my spirit, As thy soul speaks to mine."

"The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created."

"In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time."

"[On the British winter of 1962–1963] The snow began just after Christmas and would not let up. By New Year the whole country had ground to a halt. The trains froze on the tracks, the abandoned trucks froze on the roads. The power stations, overloaded by million upon pathetic million of hopeless electric fires, broke down continually; not that the fires mattered, since the electricians were mostly out on strike. Water pipes froze solid; for a bath you had to scheme and cajole those rare friends with centrally heated houses, who became rarer and less friendly as the weeks dragged on. Doing the dishes became a major operation. The gastric rumble of water in outdated plumbing was sweeter than the sound of mandolins. Weight for weight, plumbers were as expensive as smoked salmon and harder to find. The gas failed and Sunday roasts were raw. The lights failed and candles, of course, were unobtainable. Nerves failed and marriages crumbled. Finally, the heart failed. It seemed the cold would never end. Nag, nag, nag."

"Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based."

"Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self."

"His face was blue, on his fingers Flecks of green. 'This is my father', I thought."

"Poetry is certainly about pitting yourself against the unknown. The thing about a poem is that you’ve got to get it right. And you’ve got to get it all right. If there’s one word wrong, then the whole thing won’t work. It can be a 500 line or 5 line poem, it doesn’t matter. You get stuck on that word that isn’t right. You know the poem isn’t going to be finished until it all clicks into place. It is a kind of weird concoction."

"We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't "us" at all."

"There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. The imperial mind keeps missing the point. It fails to appreciate, for all its benevolence, why it might come under attack, why it might, for instance, be worth a nation's while to rise up against it. The imperial mind has to be shocked out of its daydreams."

"Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so."

"Yes You have come upon the fabled lands where myths Go when they die, But some, especially the Brummagem capitalist Juju, have arrived prematurely."

"A serious mistake in a nightie, A grave disappointment all round Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty, Is all that you'll get underground. Oh he said: "If you lay off the crumpet I'll see you alright in the end. Just hang on until the last trumpet. Have faith in me, chum – I'm your friend.""

"Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world."

"It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist."

"Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral."

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."

"Poetry is not a metrical exercise."

"Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form."

"Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done."

"It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees."

"Can the ear hear a thirteen-syllable line as consisting of thirteen syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of thirteen-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organization."

"The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting."

"My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost — that it is born again."

"As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors."

"For his chaste Muse employ'd her heaven-taught lyre None but the noblest passions to inspire, Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, One line which, dying, he could wish to blot."

"The lover in the husband may be lost."

"Alas! by some degree of woe We every bliss must gain: The heart can ne'er a transport know, That never feels a pain."

"Seek to be good, but aim not to be great; A woman’s noblest station is retreat."

"None without hope e'er lov'd the brightest fair: But Love can hope, where Reason would despair."

"How much the wife is dearer than the bride."

"Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath When she heard behind her a meaning laugh And to her amazement she discovered A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard."

"My life may be much happier to-morrow Hunger and love that press against the body, The two eternal needs we recognise, Desires that so relentlessly pursue one, May get me down or raise me to the skies And make me a Don Bradman or Don Juan."

"The back streets of Fulham, Yorkshiremen in pub gardens, a laboratory rabbit, office friendships, a cutting, a quotation – anything can start him off, and when he brings us back from the outing we are usually either shaken or stirred, and sometimes both, reflecting that there is really nothing, however surreal, extravagant, improper or mundane, that Ewart could not write a poem about."

"Everything was twice repeated, Sometimes more than twice repeated, As they worked through the agenda (It seemed elastic, that agenda, Becoming longer, never shorter), Their utterances grew long, not shorter, It was just like spreading butter."

"Where none admire, 'tis useless to excel; Where none are beaux, 'tis vain to be a belle."