All a poet can do today is warn. |
If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable. |
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry? |
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's. |
Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do. |
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season. |
The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter. |
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head. |
Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill. |
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both. |
All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want. |
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom. |
Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War. |
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve. |
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose. |
She is elegant rather than belle. |
When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing. |
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law. |
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. |
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! |