So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You’ll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you’ve read.
ROBERT GRAVESIf I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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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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Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
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A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
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As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
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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.
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The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir Will celebrate with green the Mother, And every song-bird shout awhile for her; But we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of Her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
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The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
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We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
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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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You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
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Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.
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To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
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Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
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Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.
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When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!
ROBERT GRAVES