We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall
Robert Graves-The White Goddess
What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert Graves
Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.
Robert Graves-"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969)
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall
Robert Graves-The White Goddess
