Quote

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Robert Graves

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
English
Rules
Masters
Poet
Break
Bend
Every
Attempts
Grammar
Master

More quotes by Robert Graves

Image
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.
Robert Graves
Image
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
Image
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
Robert Graves
Image
There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
Robert Graves
Image
Well, we've been lucky devils both And there is no need for a pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff Close bound enough.
Robert Graves
Image
Marriage, like money, is still with us and, like money, progressively devalued.
Robert Graves
Image
The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
Robert Graves
Image
What we now call finance is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert Graves
Image
Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.
Robert Graves
Image
Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave 's narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
Robert Graves
Image
New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.
Robert Graves
Image
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves
Image
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
Image
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
Robert Graves
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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