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The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.

Basil Bunting

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That’s not poetry’s purpose.
BASIL BUNTING

Prose Purpose Wells
Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.
BASIL BUNTING

Permanent Sand Silly Wind
Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.
BASIL BUNTING

Anemia Culture Islam
Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.
BASIL BUNTING

Ears Reader Render Smart Sound
All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, ‘Look at it, listen to it.’ Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
BASIL BUNTING

Jug Looks Matters
Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166
BASIL BUNTING

Months Names Splits
The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.
BASIL BUNTING

Duty Lines Poet
But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
BASIL BUNTING

Determination Fool Idiot
I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.
BASIL BUNTING

Father Hate Spring
Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.
BASIL BUNTING

Change Cities Earth Home Lousy Names
Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
BASIL BUNTING

Itself Preparation Provide Wine
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
BASIL BUNTING

Confusing Confusion Psychology
Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
BASIL BUNTING

Age Madness Temptation
To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.
BASIL BUNTING

Antiquity Appreciate Conditions
Men are fools to invest in real estate.
BASIL BUNTING

Fool Men Real

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.

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The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.

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