Wilfred Owen

“I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?”

“The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.”

“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.”

“I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.”

“Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.”

“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!”

“Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.”

“Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.”

“Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.”

“Some say God caught them even before they fell.”

“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

“All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.”

“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

“We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death... The marvel is we did not all die of cold.”

“I am marooned on a Crag of Superiority in an ocean of soldiers.”

“What passing bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,And bugles calling for them from sad shires.What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall,Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”

“Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, — knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: when each proud fighter bragsHe wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.”

“She is elegant rather than belle.”

“But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”