Skip to content

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

Another quote →

More quotes by Basil Bunting

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.

The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.

Villon (1930)

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.
Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work

What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

All Basil Bunting quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Basil Bunting (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.