Skip to main content

Aging & Wisdom Quote by Basil Bunting

"Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?"

About this Quote

Bunting’s line snaps like a cold wire: a single “moment” pitched against an entire “age,” private impulse trying to outvote public law. The question form is doing most of the work. It’s not seeking an answer so much as staging a moral courtroom in miniature, where desire pleads temporary insanity and the state counters with the bland, heavy machinery of consent.

The phrasing is slyly legalistic. “Age of consent” is bureaucratic, impersonal, a policy term meant to protect bodies by reducing them to thresholds and numbers. Bunting yokes it to “madness,” a word that romantic culture has long used to varnish obsession as fate. The friction exposes how easily passion borrows the language of exception: I wasn’t myself; it was only once; the rules are too crude for what I felt. By setting “madness” against “consent,” Bunting refuses the sentimental story that intensity is its own alibi.

The subtext is harsher than the elegance suggests. Consent is not only a feeling but a social guarantee, especially where power and age distort choice. The line hints at the classic modernist temptation to treat transgression as art’s oxygen, then asks what that costs when the transgression isn’t abstract but embodied. It also reads as self-indictment: the speaker recognizes the seduction of the excuse even while exposing it as thin.

Contextually, Bunting’s era is one in which poets often flirted with the mythology of the unruly male genius. This question punctures that pose. It’s wit with consequences: a neat epigram that forces romance to meet statute, and makes “moment” sound embarrassingly small.

Quote Details

TopicEthics & Morality
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Bunting, Basil. (2026, January 15). Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/can-a-moment-of-madness-make-up-for-an-age-of-161104/

Chicago Style
Bunting, Basil. "Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?" FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/can-a-moment-of-madness-make-up-for-an-age-of-161104/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?" FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/can-a-moment-of-madness-make-up-for-an-age-of-161104/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Basil Add to List
Basil Bunting on passion and a life of consent
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

United Kingdom Flag

Basil Bunting (March 3, 1900 - April 17, 1985) was a Poet from United Kingdom.

4 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Seneca the Younger, Statesman
Seneca the Younger