Robert Graves on Poets
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“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
“The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his. Truth and Reason show but dim, And all's poetry with him.”
“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.”
“Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy.”