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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.

Robert Graves

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Robert Graves
Age: 90 †
Born: 1895
Born: July 24
Died: 1985
Died: December 7
Literary Critic
Military Personnel
Mythographer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Theatre Critic
Translator
Robert von Ranke-Graves
Robert Von Ranke-Graves
Robert Ranke Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves
Seems
Public
Persons
Audience
Ideas
Word
Person
Wrong
Writing
Talking
Poets
Never
Idea
Poet
Time
Use
Unless
Money
Single

More quotes by Robert Graves

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Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
Robert Graves
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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.
Robert Graves
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Through the window I can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright to seem quite dead. But old Death, who can't forget, Waits his time and watches yet, Waits and watches by the door.
Robert Graves
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The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Robert Graves
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Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves
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What we now call finance is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert Graves
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For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.
Robert Graves
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The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but accessory in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
Robert Graves
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Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
Robert Graves
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Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
Robert Graves
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Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves
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I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
Robert Graves
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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.
Robert Graves
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Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
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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.
Robert Graves
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I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
Robert Graves
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We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
Robert Graves
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The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
Robert Graves
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Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
Robert Graves
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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.
Robert Graves