The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
ROBERT GRAVESThere’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
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Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
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Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
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I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
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Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
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Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.
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She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
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Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.
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This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
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I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate.
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No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
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New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.
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There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
ROBERT GRAVES -
I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
ROBERT GRAVES -
One smile relieves a heart that grieves.
ROBERT GRAVES