As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
Robert GravesThe difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. 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.
Robert GravesThis seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert GravesThe remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Robert GravesThe 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