“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”

I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.

As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever.

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.

Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate.

No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.

Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.