Robert Graves Quotes
Most popular Robert Graves Quotes
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse.
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists.
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Love is a universal migraine A bright stain on the vision Blotting out reason.
The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.
Writing a poem for me is putting myself in a very odd state indeed in which I am excessively sensitive to interruption—I can hear, or think I can hear, people doing disturbing things behind shut doors three houses off—and really suffer very painfully, as though I were performing a major operation on my own skull.
The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright or lust—the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.
